Table of Contents

Introduction

Outline

Chapter 1: In the Beginning, 1895 - 1917

Chapter 2: Birth of the "Two-State Solution," 1929 - 1947

Chapter 3: Israel Born, Palestine Destroyed, 1947 - 1967

Chapter 4: Rebirth of the "Two-State Solution," 1967 - 1976

Chapter 5: The Possible Decade, 1976 - 1987

Chapter 6: Personal Involvement Stories, 1981 - 1985

Chapter 7: From Intifada to Madrid, 1987 - 1991

Chapter 8: From Madrid to Oslo, 1991 - 1995

Chapter 9: False Peace Becomes Disaster, 1995 - 2001

Chapter 10: Sharon Cometh, Arafat Goeth, 2001 - 2006

The Life & Death of the
"The Two-State Solution"

by Mark Bruzonsky and Hisham Ahmed

One of us is an American Jew raised in a religious and Zionist family who became the first Washington Representative of the World Jewish Congress and played a major role in convincing Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to make his history-changing visit to Israel. The other is a dispossessed Palestinian Muslim born in despair in a refugee camp who was to become a Fulbright Scholar and a distinguished Professor of Middle East and International Affairs. We have joined together to tell the story of what has really happened and why about one of our world's most important and intractable conflicts, one which we have been involved in throughout our lives.

Mark Bruzonsky Bruzonsky with Hillary Clinton

xxx
Hisham Ahmed Ahmed with Yasser Arafat

Hisham Ahmed – HishamAhmed.com

Selected as one of top students in Palestine leading to major scholarships to three American Universities

Ph.D. Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara

Thesis on American Foreign Policy and Palestinian Self-Determination 1917-1948

Fulbright Scholar and author of one of first published studies about the rise of Hamas

Chairman, Dept of Political Science, St. Mary's College in California

Previously Professor at Florida International Univ, Univ of North Dakota, Birzeit Univ, Bethlehem Univ

Selected to be TV Interviewer of all Palestinian Presidential Candidates 2006

Numerous publications, lectures, and TV appearances about Palestine and Israel.

Mark Bruzonsky – MarkBruzonsky.com

Personally helped convince Egyptian President Sadat to make his historic visit to Israel

Chief U.N. Representative, International Student Movement for the United Nations

Root-Tilden Scholar, New York University Law School, J.D.

Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, M.P.A.

First Washington Representative World Jewish Congress under Dr. Nahum Goldman and Philip Klutznick

Author of THE PARIS DECLARATION, “The Balfour Declaration for the Palestinian People”, published on Page 1 of LeMonde in 1982

Associate Editor Worldview Magazine and Interview Forum Editor The Middle East Magazine

Weekly Syndicated Columnist in newspapers through the Middle East for 10 years.

Host Mid-East Realities TV Program for 10 years.

The short phrases "Middle East Peace Process" and "Two-State Solution" have taken on long lives of their own in contemporary world affairs. Repeatedly for many years now everyone has heard about this "process", which seems to be never-ending, and about this "solution", that somehow never comes to be.

Our own lives, in very different ways, have paralleled in historical time this destiny-changing sui generis Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mark Bruzonsky was born in Duluth, Minnesota, into a very Jewish and Zionist family in the immediate post-Holocaust years and at the very time the United Nations debate about partitioning Palestine was taking place.

Hisham Ahmed was born in a Palestinian Refugee Camp, Deheishe near Bethlehem, in what was then Jordan, a few years before the history-changing 1967 war and in the wake of the Nakba (the “Disaster”) that befell the Palestinian people.

Each of our identities and destinies were forged by the turbulent world around us and in critical ways by the growing hostilities between Jews and Arabs. Both of us would grow up to become involved in significant and complimentary ways, as we were to learn from each other in the writing of this book, in the seemingly omnipresent and never-ending attempts to bring about the "Two-State Solution".

It was in fact in this context that we first met at a Middle East Conference in Washington, DC more than twenty five years ago. We have been friends and colleagues ever since.

The novel approach we have taken to "writing" this book “together” is one that in a sense came naturally to us...but only after a long time.

By no means, however, is our book meant to be fully comprehensive. There are so many historical, political, and thoughtfully opinionated books available about what is arguably the most central and long-lasting conflict of our time – and we provide a list of the most important and the most credible in our Resource Appendix.

By every means, however, our book is meant to be both broadly historical in scope and uniquely personal in drawing upon our own many and varied experiences and resultant conclusions.

Indeed, we believe our backgrounds and past involvements give us both special insights and make it possible for us together to offer serious historical depth and critical perspective based on first-hand experiences as well as our scholarly and journalistic pursuits.

Each of us as well is known for our independence of thought, personal integrity, and great care over the years not to be co-opted by or sell-out to well-funded but highly partisan organizations -- which also explains why we have been friends for so long and why we are able to so enthusiastically join together to co-author this book at this critical time.

Indeed, after so many years of knowing each other we came to realize that we had been involved with and talking about the "Two-State Solution" quite literally from the first day we met. As a result, we realized that a joint book could provide us a way to share much of our own lives, our own experiences, our own convictions, and now our own conclusions, with many others who in their own lives and their own ways have also been affected by the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Though we've never before worked so extensively together on such a major undertaking as this book, we remembered as we got started that we had in the past written a few articles together going back to the time of the Madrid Conference in 1991. And each of us has written and spoken extensively about the conflict from our own different perspectives and involvements in the years before and after we met.

A year after the famous White House ceremony that brought together Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Bill Clinton, the two of us sat down together in a make-shift TV studio for a long multi-hour on-camera discussion that was featured as two half-hour cable TV programs at the time. Back then there was a very widespread conclusion that the "Peace Process" had finally succeeded and was now irreversible. Our own assessments however, even then, were quite otherwise going against the strong current of opinions and commentaries of that time.

Throughout all the years since we have always been in close touch and always highly valued each other's perspective and insights.

Then in 2004 when Yasser Arafat died, the result of a "stealth assassination" we both independently concluded, we teamed up to discuss, to analyze, and to try to help people understand via Mark's small organization, MiddleEast.org, what had really happened and what to now expect.

And so it is with this background that it finally came naturally to us one day, about the time what is now called “The Arab Spring” was beginning, that we realized we really should be writing a book together. But what kind of book? How should we write it together? What would distinguish it? What would make it worthwhile? What could make it important? Do we really have something new, different, credible, and important to say?

We quickly realized the heart of the book should definitely be what we personally know best -- "The Peace Process" and the long quest to achieve a solution to the Arab-Israeli Conflict. But we also realized that even we, quite immersed in the subject throughout our lifetimes, were going to have to do further research on historical issues and political developments and give further thought to all that has happened in order to prepare ourselves to interact with each other and make a serious book out of all of our knowledge and experiences.

We next realized that rather than an academic book and rather than a journalistic endeavor – both of which we had done extensively throughout our careers -- we should instead now focus in on doing comprehensively and systematically what we had been doing ever since we met.

So from the start, even with some colleagues we trusted doubting this would work for a book (doubts we then overcame when they read our initial chapters), we decided we would dialogue with each other, chapter by chapter, and then take each transcript and from it mold everything together into the book you are now about to read.

As we did so we began to realize and more fully appreciate the real virtue of this process. We found ourselves still learning from each other, we found ourselves drawing each other out in ways that would not have happened if we had not done this together and in this way.

All this said, we are however writing this book not just for other academics, journalists, experts, and those who have had considerable involvement with “The Peace Process” or its “Solution” as we have. Rather we have labored at this over a three-year period, writing and rewriting, so this book would be valuable for and appeal to a broad, diverse, and international audience.

We so much hope the approach we have taken and the format we have chosen will make this book of compelling interest to persons coming from many different backgrounds and perspectives of their own. We so much hope persons who disagree with our conclusions, as well as those who agree, will find this book of exceptional value.

Our overall goal has been to make this book, as difficult and dense as the subject can sometimes appear, of great interest both to those who have lived through many of the events we discuss as well as those much younger and for whom so much of this is “history”. We have striven to also make this book easily readable for those now in high school and university, those early in their lives and careers, who are themselves grappling with today's unfolding events and not fully aware of many critical events from the past that still shape and impact on events today.

As we complete this book in the first weeks of 2014 we are most hopeful we have accomplished the goals we set for ourselves and there will be interest in having the book published in a number of languages in addition to English, especially Arabic and Hebrew, French, German, and maybe we hope Russian and Chinese.

Early on we decided that we should take a chronological approach but begin not with our own involvements during the years the conflict was already raging but with the origins of the conflict more than a hundred years ago in the 19th century. Indeed we are totally convinced that to really understand and appreciate what is going on politically and diplomatically today it is crucial to be constantly aware of what has come before.

We have kept in mind throughout the preparation of this book that we should try to focus in on those things we think most important from the past, especially those things that the parties themselves try to overlook or marginalize because it suits their interests today that people either forget or not know.

We purposefully have not made this a heavily footnoted book. We wanted the reader to be able to share in the flow of the discussion between the two of us and we've tried hard to make this an easy and engaging read. We believe the conversational style coupled to the chronological approach contributes to making this book easily digestible, chapter by chapter, as well as overall compellingly credible and convincing.

We do however make occasional timely references and footnotes to specific things each of us was personally involved in at critical times. For instance Mark's private maybe history-changing meeting with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and then a few years later, shortly after Sadat's assassination, his authorship of The Paris Declaration, published on the front page of LeMonde in July 1982, and termed by the European Representative of the PLO “the Balfour Declaration for the Palestinian People”. And for instance Hisham's authorship as a Fulbright Scholar of one of the first major studies about Hamas and years later his selection to be one of three persons to interview on TV all of the Palestinian Presidential candidates in the 2006 election.

Also, at critical times in the past, both of us have appeared on TV, written special articles, and participated directly in the "peace process" and attempts to bring about a "solution" to the conflict. As we believe it enhances both the value and credibility of this book these are also things we occasionally make reference to, footnote, and then provide the relevant materials and documents in the book's Appendix.

In this way we believe the items in the Appendix can significantly enhance our reader's understanding of the evolution of the "Two-State Solution" and how this concept has itself changed over the years eventually bringing about, we conclude, it's own demise.

We further believe that because of our unique backgrounds and involvements the Appendix itself contains valuable information not easily otherwise available that is quite helpful today in reflecting upon how the “Two-State Solution” has been viewed and discussed in years past. We also frankly believe the things we've chosen to put in the Appendix considerably add to our own qualifications as experts who have indeed now written a uniquely insightful and valuable book about what we have ourselves personally experienced as well as learned.

It is also our intention to make the Appendix documents and information available, to keep everything updated, and to provide an forum for readers at www.PalestineState.net. At this readers-only website we will personally answer reader questions, participate in an on-line forum, and occasionally provide supplementary information.

Finally, it should be remembered though-out, “The Peace Process" and the "Two-State Solution" are subjects that the various protagonists, and their many allies and partisans, have invested much time and money in constant attempts to mold and manipulate public opinion, as well as to control political developments. There are numerous think-tanks and publications associated with the key governments, and groups that work with them, whose very raison d'etre is to get their well-paid partisan analysts into print and onto radio and TV programs.

We ourselves take considerable pride that we have always remained independent from and skeptical of those organizations and persons who have in effect allowed themselves to become hired mouthpieces, hired-gun partisans, and “lobbyists” of various kinds.

We could not have written this book together, and been close friends for so long, if we did not know how each of us has refused to go down those roads to notoriety, career-advancement, money and privileges; but instead we have both chosen the paths and made the choices you are now about to read about and about which at the end you will be in a position to make your own judgments.

The Life & Death of the
"The Two-State Solution"
By Mark Bruzonsky & Hisham Ahmed

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 - IN THE BEGINNING, 1895 - 1917

CHAPTER 2 - BIRTH OF THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION, 1917 - 1947

CHAPTER 3 - ISRAEL BORN, PALESTINE DESTROYED, 1947 – 1967

CHAPTER 4 - REBIRTH OF TWO-STATE SOLUTION, 1967 - 1976

CHAPTER 5 - THE POSSIBLE DECADE, 1976 - 1987

CHAPTER 6 - PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT STORIES, 1981 - 1985

CHAPTER 7 - FROM INTIFADA TO MADRID, 1987 - 1991

CHAPTER 8 - FROM MADRID TO OSLO, 1991 - 1995

CHAPTER 9 – FALSE PEACE BECOMES DISASTER, 1995 - 2001

CHAPTER 10 - SHARON COMETH, ARAFAT GOETH, 2001 - 2005

CHAPTER 11 – MORE WARS, DESPAIR, CHAOS, 2006 - 2008

CHAPTER 12 – OBAMA TO THE RESCUE?, 2009 - 2010

CHAPTER 13 – ARAB SPRING AND THE UNITED NATIONS, 2011 - 2013

CHAPTER 14 - DIFFERENT ENDGAMES ENVISIONED BY ALL

EPILOGUE - WHAT NOW?

APPENDIX

RESOURCE APPENDIX

Chapter I

In the Beginning, 1895 – 1917

”We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the

border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries,

while denying it any employment in our own country ....

Expropriation and the removal of the poor must be

carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

Theodore Herzl

Founder of “Zionism”

As leader of the Great Arab Revolt Sharif Hussein declared independence

from the Ottoman Empire in June 1916 and was to become King of the Arabs

including Palestine.

Sayyid Hussein bin Ali

Sharif and Emir of Mecca

Mark: Hisham, it seems everyone is still talking about the “Two-State Solution” after so many years. Some people say it’s dead and over; some governments say it’s here and now. Whatever, the “Two-State Solution” has become a recurring term in our political rhetoric. And our own lives have both been partly defined by this seemingly unending conflict. I was born an American Jew and some of my earliest memories are the singing of “Hatikva,” the Israeli National Anthem, at the end of every Passover sedar dinner. You were born in a Palestinian refugee camp, literally born into this conflict. So Hisham, from your perspective, how and when did Palestine become a conflict requiring a solution?

Hisham: Mark, I would wake up every morning in my youth with the howling ghost of the Israeli occupation looming over the heads of my family. The roots of the conflict, of the occupation itself, date back to the early Zionist immigration to Palestine, which occurred primarily in the second half of the 19th century. It was during this early immigration that Palestinians first felt that there was some foreign force vying to take their country from them.

The first actual Zionist settlement was established in Palestine in 1882, even before Theodore Herzl's famous book.

It was in 1895 that Herzl's The Jewish State was published and subsequently the first World Zionist Conference was convened in1897 in Basil, Switzerland. That was when the Palestinian people began to realize that there was real danger coming their way. Both Herzl's book and the conference made it clear that Zionism was established to provide a state for the Jewish people and to outline a strategy for the unification of Jewish political and economic power to that end. Really, Mark, the goal from the start was to take Palestine from the Palestinians.

Mark: I recall that Herzl, in The Jewish State, wrote that the Arab population living in Palestine, the “penniless peasants” as he referred to them, would be forced to leave one way or another.

The percentage of Jews living in Palestine at that time was quite small. I don’t think more than 50,000 Jews lived there; most of whom were religious and non-Zionist Jews, living mainly in the Jerusalem area.

Jewish and Arab Population Growth in Palestine/Israel from 1914 to 2005

If such a small population of Jews were in Palestine, then how in the world did the Zionist movement catch on as it did, and what was the initial reaction from the Palestinian population?

Year

Jews

Arabs

Total

% Jews to Total

1914

60,000

731,000

791,000

7.585%

1922

83,790

668,258

752,048

11.141%

1931

174,606

858,708

1,033,314

16.897%

1941

474,102

1,111,398

1,585,500

29.902%

1950

1,203,000

1,172,100

2,375,100

50.650%

1960

1,911,300

1,340,100

3,251,400

58.783%

1970*

2,582,000

1,045,000

3,627,000

71.188%

1980

3,282,700

2,100,000

5,382,700

60.986%

1995

4,495,100

3,506,900

8,002,000

56.173%

2005

5,275,700

5,139,100

10,414,800

50.656%

Israel / Palestine: Arab / Jewish Population (1914 to 2005)

Hisham: The Zionist movement was able to make inroads in Europe right away because of Christian anti-semitism. The Zionists had a real reason to fight back and push for drastic measures. Then, during World War I, the Zionist movement was able to manipulate the politics of the war years to its advantage. The movement clearly understood that the European nations were totally preoccupied with the war itself. This preoccupation and involvement in the war would soon lead to covert operations designed to manipulate the outcome in the Middle East when the European victors replaced the Ottomans. The Zionists also understood that the idea of the nation-state could be exploited for their own ends. In fact, the Zionist movement had signaled to both Germany and Great Britain that whoever came to the aid of the Zionist cause could expect help and support from powerful and wealthy Jewish businessmen and bankers.

Mark: The Zionists even went to the Ottomans as well before it was clear who would win World War I. They really played all sides.

Hisham: Yes they wanted to make sure they were partnered with the winners. There were also important Zionist persons, such as Chaim Weizmann. He had invented a very important new type of explosive that was soon used extensively by the British in their war effort. And there were also important Zionist bankers who supported the British war effort.

It wasn’t just the British. The Zionists truly manipulated the United States as well even in these early days. The United States was in a period of isolationism. Most Americans had no desire to involve their country in the European war, but the Zionists wanted American help and support for their cause. The Russians meanwhile, due to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, pulled out of the war in the months before the British Government published The Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917.

The Balfour Declaration was greatly celebrated by the Zionist movement which saw it as the first major international step toward creating a Jewish State in Palestine. The British felt that there was a terrible power vacuum on the Eastern front, and they were keenly aware of the severe losses they were suffering due to Germany's U-Boat campaign in the Atlantic. It was at this time that the Zionists sent their emissaries to the British to suggest that the British were in a vital position to convince the United States to enter the war on their side, and so they could help each other.

In addition to putting pressure on the U.S. through the British, the Zionists also worked inside the U.S. They looked to Louis Brandeis, then the first ever Jewish Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court and a close friend of President Woodrow Wilson who had appointed him the year before. It was in fact Brandeis personally who helped convince Wilson that the U.S. must intervene in World War I.

In this way both the British and the Americans became supportive of the Zionist movement and this is the historical and personal context in which The Balfour Declaration was issued. In fact Brandeis himself personally presided over the very careful drafting of the Balfour Declaration. He went over some 33 revisions I believe, closely coordinating at every step with both the U.S. and U.K. governments.

The Balfour Declaration

That Declaration really shook the whole world. Immediately Palestinians demonstrated against it. In a very real sense, the Balfour Declaration was the first major international trigger of the conflict that has persisted ever since.

Mark: I think it’s also important to remember that the Zionist leaders at the time were mostly secular and mostly integrated into the European system, not ostracized from it. Herzl, author of The Jewish State, was not a religious Jew. These secular and integrated Jews, like Brandeis, were the champions of the original Zionist movement. They, as you said, were able to exploit the war years because of their close relationships to political officials, financial clout, and growing determination to make Palestine a Jewish State, though at the time they didn't state that in public. In fact, in public, they continually denied that that was their goal.

Also at the same time, both the British and the French were continually maneuvering to get Arab support for the war while at the same time plotting behind the backs of the Arabs for how they would control the region after the war.

Map: The Sykes-Picot Agreement – 1916

\This was the period of Lawrence of Arabia, of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, of the then secret Sykes-Picot Agreement…as well as of the public Balfour Declaration.

Then, when the war ended, you had the Paris Peace Conference followed by the San Remo Conference and other international conferences as well…all designed to legitimize European colonialism in the region and prevent the greater “Arab State” the Arab leaders were then not only dreaming about but in fact demanding.

Then in 1922 there was what was called the Churchill White Paper as well. All of these agreements, declarations, conferences and papers had to do in one way or another with the future of Palestine and the entire region – on the one hand deceptively reassuring the Arabs and on the other hand cooperating with the Zionists and the powerful corporate and business interests.

In those days there was no discussion of any kind of “Two-State Solution” because it seemed to everyone that Palestine was Palestine and the various communal concerns would somehow be resolved and accommodated one way or another.

I think it’s important to remember that, at the time, the whole world called the area Palestine. Even the Zionist leadership kept insisting that they had no intention of establishing a “Jewish State” in Palestine, despite what Herzl had said. Today the major Jewish newspaper called The Jerusalem Post was actually called The Palestine Post when it was founded as late as 1932 by an American Jewish Zionist.

Hisham, at the time of the Balfour Declaration and as World War I was coming to an end, what were the Palestinians doing?

Hisham: They were in a state of shock, Mark. It had become alarmingly evident that the British now viewed Palestine as part of their own territory. The Palestinians felt their existence was in danger, so they protested. These were a tranquil people living on their land as they had done for thousands of years. It was clear from the beginning that the Zionist 'Colonial Project' was making headway against the Palestinians, but nevertheless the Palestinians never succumbed, never acquiesced. They resisted from the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 more and more in fact into the 1920s.

Mark: Hisham, I have a telling quote from the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, from the official Zionist representative at that time. “It has been said and is still being obstinately repeated by anti-Zionists again and again,” Nahum Sokolow said at the Conference, “that Zionism aims at the creation of an independent ‘Jewish State.’” “But this is fallacious,” he continued, “The ‘Jewish State’ was never part of the Zionist programme.”

So, they were officially saying to the Arabs, to the Palestinians, and to the world, even after the Balfour Declaration, that there was no reason for Palestinians to fear losing their country, that the Jews just wanted to live in peaceful coexistence with the Arabs who were by far the largest population group in the country. In those days it seems it was common for Zionist representatives to keep reassuring the Palestinians that the goal was not a Jewish State. In retrospect, of course, it’s now realized such an approach was designed to mislead, confuse, divide, and pacify the population. It also gave the British an excuse to allow growing Jewish immigration into Palestine.

Also very important to remember, it was at this time that the so-called “Mandates” were created by the new League of Nations. The “Mandates” related to the way in which the League of Nations in a sense legitimized the dividing up of the territory of the former Ottoman Empire. They were now as we look back a very public extension of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

Much of the territory of the former Ottoman Empire came under this system of “Mandates” in fact. That’s how the British then legitimized their control of Palestine and also how the area east of the Jordan River was turned into Transjordan under the rule of a Hashemite Emir whom they made into a King.

The Ottoman Empire

Hisham: I view the Mandate, or “Mandates,” as forbearance for the colonization of Palestine. The British marched their troops into Palestine in 1917 and that’s when the British occupation began. In 1919, even though Woodrow Wilson had for the most part succumbed to Zionist dictates, he did send an American Commission to investigate the situation in Palestine. The Commission was called The King-Crane Commission. In the summer of 1919, those on The King-Crane Commission sent many telegrams to Wilson advising him that the Palestinian people vehemently opposed both the Zionist project and the British Mandate. Their report was suppressed for three years. Nevertheless, it was important because it illustrated the widespread opposition to the British Mandate and to the Zionist colonization of Palestine from the start.

"An International Commission was projected…to study conditions in the Turkish Empire with reference to possible mandates. The American Section of that Commission is in the Near East simply and solely to get as accurate and definite information as possible concerning the conditions, the relations, and the desires of all the peoples and classes concerned in order that President Wilson and the American people may act with full knowledge of the facts in any policy they may be called upon hereafter to adopt concerning the problems of the Near East – whether in the Peace Conference or in the later League of Nations.”

-King-Crane Commission Statement of Mission, 1919

Mark: There is another historical moment I recall of some significance I think. When the British commander, General Allenby, marched into Jerusalem, London ordered him to not ride in on horses and not to prominently fly the British flag and certainly not to demonstrate support for Zionism. So, instead, he paraded into Jerusalem on foot down the same central street still named for him today. As I recall, even without the fanfare, the Arab notables of Jerusalem cautiously gathered to hear Allenby give his speech and there was little enthusiasm and much apprehension right from the start. So, even then, the political and nationalistic sensitivities were very well known and understood, it seems.

Hisham: This was a period of shock for the people of Palestine. They had been living in their own country and suddenly this invading power came to violently take their country from them, and sought to erase and negate their cultural and national identity.

There are incredible stories about how people resisted the occupation in those early days. In fact, there is a story that was related to me by my father. Although this touches on a later period, during the 1940's, it's an excellent example. In his home town of Zakariyya, my father was approached by a high ranking British officer while farming the land. The tall white man walked up to him my father and asked him how to eat the local cactus fruit.

My father gestured to the officer (as my father does not speak any English) that you simply pick it up and eat it. But what my father did not tell the officer was that cactus needs to be first cleaned from the prickly thorns and then peeled before eating. My father was basically exercising his own way of getting back at the British.

Mark: Well Hisham, the Palestinian rebellion really started a long time ago then. So, the popular idea that the “first” Intifada only started in the late 1980's is not entirely accurate. It sounds like the Intifada -- the rebellions, the uprisings -- really started right at the time of the Balfour Declaration and the British occupation at the end of World War I. The uprisings were well underway by the time your father had his little run-in with the British officer. So, how did the actual resistance to British occupation and the Balfour Declaration progress? What happened in the 1920s? What happened from the Palestinian perspective?

Hisham: During this period, there was constant resistance against the constant Zionist expansionary polices of taking the land and bringing more European Jews to Palestine.

Mark: And then in 1929 came a much more violent reaction?

Hisham: That was called the “Buraq” uprising. The Zionists tried to claim a very holy Muslim site and sparked one of the first major Palestinian rebellions. The rebellion continued for years and led to the largest and the longest Palestinian uprising, which lasted from 1936 to 1939. The Buraq uprising temporarily succeeded in pressuring the British to try new diplomatic steps aimed to soothe the Palestinians and restrict the Jewish Zionists.

Mark: Alright, this then, in broad strokes, is the origin of the conflict we are still living with today. You’ve really helped me understand how the origins of what we call the Intifadas of our own day really began back then. And also my own country was far more involved through President Wilson and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis then I realized, even though nearly all the major Jewish organizations of the time were actually skeptical and in most cases opposed to Zionism, fearing that the loyalty of American Jews to the US might be questioned. Most American Jews at the time were busy integrating into American society and not thinking about or wanting a “Jewish State”.

Chapter II

Birth of the “Two-State Solution,” 1929 - 1947

Emir Feisal and Chaim Weizmann

In January 1919, in association with the Paris Peace Conference,

the “Feisal-Weizmann Agreement” was signed accepting the Balfour

Declaration among other Zionist, British, and US-desired provisions. Already

concerned about efforts to undermine long-promised Arab independence,

and Jewish immigration to Palestine, Emir Feisal hand-wrote on the

document this critical reservation:

"Provided the Arabs obtain their independence...I shall concur in the

above articles. But if the slightest modification or departure were to be

made [regarding our demands], I shall not be then bound by a single word of

the present Agreement which shall be deemed void and of no account or validity...”

Mark: Hisham, in Chapter 1 we discussed the origins of the conflict from Theodore Herzl and the roots of the Zionist movement to the Balfour Declaration. And we talked about the immediate protests in various forms from the Palestinians. It a conflict that, from the beginning, was born out of the Euro-centric 19th century notions of the nation-state and colonialism. While many may think of the “Two-State Solution” as a recent development attempting to resolve this conflict, actually the roots of this idea also really go back quite some time. As a Palestinian Hisham, when did the idea of a “Two-State Solution” originate?

Hisham: It started as early as 1937 when the British tried to subdue the major Palestinian rebellion of that time with brute military force. When this failed, the British turned to more traditional political means by sending a committee of inquiry for a supposed investigation into the unrest. What was called “The Peel Commission” published its report that year and this was the first time there was a formal suggestion that Palestine be divided into two parts. Of course the Palestinians not only opposed having their country divided, but the very idea that it would be done by some British Commission. Clearly it was an infringement on their most basic rights. The rebellion that exploded into the open in 1936 continued until 1939 when the British issued what was called the “White Paper”.

Mark: As I recall, there was a very significant uprising even a few years earlier in 1929. It would seem, looking back now, that there were in fact Intifadas (Uprisings) way back in the 1920s and 1930s, not just in “modern” times.

Hisham: Opposition really started the moment the Palestinians realized that the British were aiding the Zionist movement. Initial resistance began as early as the Balfour Declaration which the Palestinians immediately realized was intended to lead to the creation of a Jewish State in their country of Palestine. You are right Mark: what was called the “Buraq Uprising” was in 1929 and it could certainly be seen as the real first Intifada. Then in 1937 the uprising at that time was quite remarkable because of the intensity and the determination with which people protested. It was one of the longest civil disobedience strikes in recorded history. Consequently, it brought about some of the most brutal colonial crackdowns in the history of the British occupation of Palestine. From this situation came the

Peel Commission, then the next year the Woodhead Commission, then two years later the White Paper.

Peel Commission Map to Divide Palestine into a Jewish State, an Arab State, and an International Area

By 1939, both the Palestinians and the British were exhausted from the turmoil of the past decade. At the same time, World War II was well on its way. The British knew they would have to withdraw most of the 56,000 troops they had deployed to quell the uprisings in Palestine in order to stave off Hitler's war machine.

Mark: So the popular and sustained resistance by Palestinians really can be traced in serious ways as far back as the First World War it seems.

Hisham: Yes, Mark, Palestinian resistance commenced as soon as the British first whispered their ambitions for Palestine and the Zionist movement. The basic reality is that resistance has not stopped ever since. Palestinian resistance is nearly a century old now!

Mark: This would explain why the Zionist leaders were making official “No Jewish State” statements trying to defuse the tension with the Palestinians immediately after the Balfour Declaration including at the Paris Peace Conference. By the time of the Peel Commission Report the notion of a “Two-State Solution” then must have seemed to the Zionist leadership as quite a victory. For here you had for the first time “official” recommendations that there could be an independent “Jewish State”, and that wuold give further justification and legitimacy to the idea of allowing far more Jewish immigration to what was still then known to the whole world as Palestine.

“If we cannot find ways of peace and understanding,

if the only way of establishing the Jewish National home

is upon the bayonets of some Empire, our whole enterprise is
not worthwhile, and it is better that the Eternal People that

has outlived many a mighty empire should possess its

soul in patience and plan and wait. It is one of the great

civilizing tasks before the Jewish people to enter the

promised land not in the Joshua way but bringing peace and

culture, hard work and sacrifice and love, and a determination

to do nothing that cannot be justified before the conscience

of the world.”

Judah L. Magnes

Chancellor, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, 1929

Hisham: Absolutely. The Zionists knew quite well back then that the British had continued to put Zionist interests at the forefront of British policies in Palestine. They felt even then they were well on their way to achieving their goal.

Mark: Yes, but why did the British then change their policies in 1939? Also I think we should recall that the British had years before in fact appointed a devout Jewish Zionist, Herbert Samuel, as their Commissioner to Palestine. Maybe I guess the British seemed to be trying to have it both ways, kind of like what the Americans have been doing in more modern times maybe?

Hisham: Yes, Herbert Samuel was indeed the British High Commissioner of Palestine starting in 1920, and he aided the Zionist agenda immensely in those crucial years until 1925 when he returned to London.

By 1939, the British, exhausted and concerned about war developments in Europe, issued “The White Paper”. The White Paper called for a reduction in Jewish illegal immigration into Palestine in an attempt to placate the Palestinians and the Arabs. It also mandated that the British slow the confiscation of land and reduce the burden of taxes on the indigenous Palestinian people.

Most importantly, the White Paper promised that in twenty years there would be Arab independence, albeit taking the form of an independent Arab state living alongside a Jewish state. So here was the more refined basis of the original “Two-State Solution”. While some in the Palestinian leadership reluctantly accepted the views of the White Paper, at that time the Zionists rejected it due to the reduction in land confiscations and Arab taxes, but mostly because of the tightened regulations on Jewish immigration to all of Palestine.

Mark: We must keep in mind as well I think Hisham that World War II was lurking and many Jews in Europe were already seeking refuge abroad. It sounds like this was also a kind of first attempted “settlement freeze” in a sense. It would seem the Palestinians have been dealing with how to stop Jewish emigration, Arab expulsion, and Jewish settlements for nearly eighty years now! No wonder they are so fed up with the current “peace plans” and all the conferences and demands still coming from the same Western countries that have tricked them and deceived them and let them down so many times in the past!

Hisham: [chuckle] Well, ironically, while the hatred of the Jews was on the rise in Europe and the United Sates, it was a very different story in Palestine. Here in the Middle East region, Jews were accepted as a recognized and respected religious community in many Arab countries as well as Palestine.

Nonetheless, the Zionists moved their headquarters to the United States at this time. This is also ironic in a way because it was at this point in time that the United States itself halted Jewish immigration; a policy that would continue throughout WWII and the Holocaust years.

Also there was another landmark event we should not overlook. In 1942, the Zionists held the Biltmore Conference in New York and that is where they laid out their latest plans more boldly and publicly for creating a separate Jewish 'commonwealth' in Palestine.

Mark: Hisham, your mention of the Biltmore Conference is very important from the Jewish-American side of things I think. In the United States, the Zionist movement during the 1920s and 1930s was always a limited and minority movement. Most American Jews, especially the elite, were busy trying to assimilate and had no desire to have their national loyalties questioned by supporting a “Jewish State” even as they sought full acceptance in their new country, and in a sense their new promised land, America. The Biltmore Conference was significant in that it was the first time that Zionism received the serious attention and support of many in the Jewish-American mainstream. Meanwhile of course World War II was underway and I wonder what was happening in Palestine then?

Hisham: Fatigue, exhaustion, and despair that the three year uprising did not achieve its goals – that's what was happening, Mark. The 1940s were tough. While the Holocaust continued in Europe, Jewish immigration kept increasing into Palestine. Meanwhile, the Second World War signified the end of the British Empire and soon after the war there was the beginning of United Nations involvement in determining the fate of Palestine – just after the First World War there had been the League of Nations.

Additionally, the Zionist movement was becoming more militant and better armed. Soon the Jews began embarking on a kind of guerrilla war campaign against the British trying to hasten their withdrawal and hoping they would be able to bring more and more Jews from Europe and take greater control themselves of more lands.

Mark: Yes and simultaneously there was understandable support for the plight of the Jewish people now in the aftermath of the unbelieveable Holocaust. For many, I think the Zionist movement became a kind of rallying point for the West's moral redemption. This then led to President Truman, against the strenuous advice of both Secretary of State, George Marshal, and Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, concluding he had to endorse the partitioning of Palestine.

But even back then the top foreign policy officials in the U.S. feared that forcing a partition of Palestine on the Arabs would lead to a never-ending state of war and gravely threaten U.S. Interests in the region. And how right history proved them to be, as sure enough, there has been an ongoing war ever since and at many times US relations and interests with key Middle East countries have been jeopardized in the region.

These same concerns are present as well today, maybe even more so. Anyway, as World War II ended, and the British prepared to leave Palestine, what was the attitude of the Palestinians then, Hisham?

Hisham: Well, even more shock! The British handed over the question of Palestine to the new United Nations. And even more than now, the U.N. was under the control of the United States. The fate of Palestine was largely left to the mercy of what was called the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). After tremendous U.S. threats and pressures the majority opinion of UNSCOP was to partition Palestine into two independent states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem being under international control. The minority opinion favored keeping Palestine as the one country that it was.

The idea of partition was officially taken to the UN General Assembly on November 26, 1947 but failed to garner the necessary votes. What happened in these days is too often forgotten.

As a result, with President Truman himself personally taking the lead, the United States used its considerable influence and many forms of pressures and inducements to convince some countries to vote for partition or risk losing US support and money.

So just a few days later, on November 29, 1947, the General Assembly voted quite differently this time and passed resolution 181. This resolution effectively authorized the partitioning of Palestine and allotted the majority of the country to the Jewish people.

Mark, even after all the years of Jewish immigration, in 1947 the Jewish population was still just 30 percent. Even so, 56 percent of Palestinian land was allotted to the Jewish people, many of whom, remember, were illegal immigrants. This included the most fertile and strategically important regions of Palestine. The remaining 43 percent was left to the Palestinians, the people whose country this was and who were continually being both deceived and disregarded.

The Zionists were actually surprised by the new vote of the U.N. Furthermore any resolution passed by the General Assembly is supposed to be no more than a recommendation rather than a binding resolution like those made by the Security Council. That was well understood at the time, indeed insisted on by the U.S. and the other “Great Powers” who were victorious in the war. But of course the Zionists made full use of the opportunity given them by this resolution and immediately commenced on a campaign to violently drive the Palestinians off even the lands allotted to them by the U.N. This was planned and purposeful, Mark.

Nahum Goldmann

Mark: Yes Hisham, how interesting, how eventful, and how fateful. And my own life intersects here not just because I was born in 1947 at the time all this was happening but because I was brought into my work by a man named Nahum Goldmann nearly 30 years later when he asked me to work with him and become the first part-time Washington Representative of the World Jewish Congress.

At the time of these events Goldmann was himself the official Zionist representative in Washington reporting directly to Ben-Gurion. And he was in fact the Founder of both the World Jewish Congress and The World Zionist Organization, as well as, of the very important to this day Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

But Goldmann was also a man of great vision and international stature. And back at that critical time he was in fact arguing with Ben-Gurion not to establish an independent Jewish State but to find some way to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians and the Arabs or else there would be unending conflict and war. How right he was in this regard!

When I met Goldmann in 1976 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York and he appointed me to represent him and the WJC in Washington, he was in fact still working valiantly to find some way to bring peace though then it was not called the “Two-State Solution” and any Israelis who met with anyone in the PLO were arrested. At that time in fact Goldmann himself was being scathingly vilified by the very Jewish and Zionist organizations he had set up because he was calling for the U.S. to recognize the PLO (which he himself was meeting with) and “impose” peace before it was too late! How right again he was!

Chapter III

Israel Born, Palestine Destroyed, 1947 - 1967

David Ben-Guron Haj Amin El-Husayni

“Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International

Regime for the City of Jerusalem...shall come into existence

in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of

the mandatory Power has been completed but in any case not

later than 1 October 1948.”

U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 (II)

Concerning the Future Government of Palestine,

29 November 1947

Map: U.N. General Assembly Plan of Partition with Economic Union, 1947

Mark: By the end of World War II, the Zionist movement worldwide, especially in the United States, had grown exponentially in size and power; and the Jewish population of Palestine had also grown considerably. The Jewish narrative, including all the revelations about the Holocaust and the episode in history with the famous Exodus ship, is well known in the United States and around the world. Yet, even today not much is known about the Palestinian experience at that time.

So Hisham, I think you offer an incredibly invaluable perspective on the conflict being born yourself in the Palestinian Refugee Camp of Deheishe near Bethlehem in1963 in what was then Jordan. Right from the beginning, you were born into this conflict as a Palestinian refugee.

From what you learned as you grew up from your friends and family, as well as your studies, what was going on for the Palestinians during the immediate aftermath of the Second World War leading up to the creation of Israel?

Hisham: There was incredible frustration on the Palestinian side at the end of the war Mark. The goals of the three-year rebellion -- 1936 to 1939 -- had not been met. The British, a nation exhausted from a devastating European war and the burdens of Empire, had essentially turned over the region to the United Nations, which meant to a very pro-Zionist United States. Added to this was the crisis caused by a Palestinian leadership fraught with infighting and treachery. Prospects were bleak.

Mark: What was the Palestinian response to this U.N. and U.S. takeover then, what were the Palestinians doing to protect themselves then?

Hisham: During the 1940s there was a Palestinian attempt at recovering from both the Jewish immigration shock of the 1930s and then the bloody campaign launched by British colonial forces against the Palestinian strikes and uprisings. In a sense though, the Second World War offered a brief respite from the escalating turmoil of the previous decade. The War changed the focus as the British were looking for allies and support everywhere, including from the Arabs, just as they had done at the time of World War I..

One of the primary national figures to rally Palestinians was Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, popularly known as Haj Amin al-Husayni. A famous resistance fighter during the 1930s, al-Husayni returned from exile to try to prepare and lead the Palestinians for ongoing struggle. He was to command Palestinian resistance in the 1948 war, but for many reasons the Palestinians were not nearly as strong as the now well-armed and determined Zionist forces.

Mark: What was the status of the idea of the “Two-State-Solution” back then? Was there much interest or discussion of any kind of “Two-State-Solution” in those days?

Hisham: It was in November of 1947 that the British handed over the question of Palestine to the United Nations. As I mentioned before it was under severe pressure from the United States that the U.N. General Assembly passed resolution 181, the resolution that called for the partitioning of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab Palestinian State. So here you had the international community, pushed hard by the Zionist movement and the United States, trying to legitimize the idea of partition and two States. But it wasn’t a solution at all, indeed it led, as many predicted it would, to decades of conflict, to war after war, and eventually to today’s impasse.

United Nations “Two-State Solution” Partition Plan with Jerusalem as “Corpus Separatum” - 1947

Palestinians were shocked at the series of events that took place. From the Palestinian perspective, resolution 181 was entirely unjust. First of all, Palestinians were hardly consulted and certainly never agreed, and thus the resolution was a grave violation of Palestine's right to self determination, on top of so many promises and reassurances given so many times over so many years.

Secondly, the terms of the partition were that 56 percent of the country would be awarded to Palestine’s Jewish minority. Furthermore, the remaining territory left to the indigenous inhabitants comprised the most arid and landlocked territories of Palestine.

So egregious was the injustice it is hardly surprising that the Palestinian community, and the Arab States collectively, decided not to allow this to happen.

It should also be mentioned that in spite of resolution 181 Zionist groups such as the Irgun were already mobilizing to take by force as much of Palestine as they could. These heavily armed militias went about massacres and brutal ethnic cleansing in ways that even now are remembered and condemned.

It was such groups that also pioneered terrorism when they blew up the King David Hotel, massacred Palestinians in villages such as Deir Yassin, and even assassinated the first U.N. Negotiator, Count Folk Bernadotte. Bernadotte it should be remembered had been designated by the Security Council itself to find some way to stop this conflict from escalating.

Count Folke Bernadotte, representing the United Nations Security Council, was attempting to bring about a “Two-State Solution” at the time he was assassinated by Israelis in 1948

Mark: Yes, right, in today's terminology what took place then was planned and systematic ethnic cleansing. There were clear territorial and political goals, no matter how much denied at the time. And in the years that followed many of those who directed such atrocities became the future leaders of the Israeli State, and after1967 of what became known as the settlement movement. Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Sharon, Peres, and many others, were all very personally involved.

Did the Palestinian population at the time really think that the rest of the Arab world would intervene and protect the Palestinians? What was the relationship between the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world back then?

Hisham: Well, Israel declared itself an independent state as soon as the British withdrew on 14 May 1948. Carefully coordinated, the Truman administration officially recognized Israel just eleven minutes after its declaration of independence. It was clear to all that this would bring on war.

And yes, frankly, the Palestinians really did expect that the Arabs would intervene and prevail. In actuality though, it turned out that the Palestinians were pretty much alone in their struggle against the Jews. The Arab armies that did arrive only did so symbolically to appease popular demands from their own citizens. In reality there was very little real help, especially as both Egypt and Jordan were still firmly under the control of the British at that time. In fact, those Arab armies that did come to aid the Palestinians, most notably the Arab Legion, did more to help Israel than harm it! Some of these armies even contributed to the ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. Secret deals had been made not only with the British but with the Zionists, especially in the case of Hashemite Jordan.

Ultimately, what resulted from that war in 1948 was the total dismemberment of Palestine. Israel emerged with 76 percent of Palestinian territory, Jordan claimed the West Bank, and Egypt took over the Gaza Strip. Over 800,000 Palestinians became refugees and close to 500 Palestinian towns and villages were left in ruins.

I have to emphasize again that the cruelty leveled against the Palestinians by Israeli forces was equally matched by the cruelty leveled upon them by the Arabs. I remember how one of my uncles even described to me the torture he endured while being held by the Jordanians on suspicion of collaborating with the resistance at that time.

MAP (needs to be found)

Map of Count Bernadotte Plan #1 – June 1948

Map of Count Bernadotte Partition Plan #2 – September 1948

Mark: Of course, in those days, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, originally created by the British and still under British quasi-control if my understanding is correct, was trying to consolidate its hold on East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In a sense, the Hashemite Kingdom was trying to bring the still-born Palestinian State under Hashemite and British rule in a new way after the Mandate.

The international community was quite divided even though the U.S. had pushed through the partition resolution. And yes that’s when Count Folke Bernadotte, the very distinguished European diplomat, was dispatched to Palestine by the U.N. Security Council. He valiantly attempted a number of different plans including what could be seen as another variant of the “Two-State Solution” at that time. Then, in the middle of his efforts, and after getting at least some of the Zionist leaders to support him, he was assassinated by Israeli extremists, by the Irgun. In a sense this early set back symbolized maybe the second early 'death' of the “Two-State Solution” at that time...until it's resurrection again many years later during our own lifetimes and involvement.

Hisham: Yes Mark, well said. Indeed the assassination of Bernadotte was politically driven to wipe out that idea, to end the possibility of a Palestinian Arab State being established at that time.

The year 1948 was a historic catastrophe for the Palestinian people. Israel was only interested in expanding its territories regardless of the impact on the Palestinians and oblivious to the ethnic-cleansing and the creation of such a vast refugee population. Even the leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, wrote in his autobiography that were it not for the massacre of Palestinians during the 1948 war, Israel would not have come to exist. It is Zionist myth that the Palestinian people left voluntarily. This is quite laughable really and a very cheap attempt to falsely alter critical history.

Mark: The ramifications went beyond Palestine I think. The entire Arab world was, in a sense, defeated by what happened. The embarrassment and loss of dignity was to lead in a few years to revolution in Egypt, the rise of Nasser, and eventually the war over the Suez Canal in 1956. What happened in the 1950s, Hisham, among Palestinians? What was the state of the “Two-State Solution” at that time?

Hisham: By the 1950s the “Two-State Solution” – never called that back then to be sure -- was gone. Due to the dismay and shock at the performance of the Arab armies and political systems, almost every Arab country went into upheaval. Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein was an army officer and witnessed the 1948 war. He saw firsthand how ill-prepared and poorly lead the Egyptian forces were. Nasser concluded that there was no genuine attempt by the regime to support the Palestinians. Lack of support for the Palestinians was one of the main reasons why he led the army rebellion in Egypt.

The unrest generated from the disastrous handling of the Palestinian cause could be felt in every Arab state. Yet, overall, the 1950s was a period of deep sleep for the question of Palestine. The Palestinians were so exhausted from the Nakba, the Disaster, that the 1950s became more a time of recovery than action.

Mark: This was also the period that saw Palestinian refugee camps become transformed from what at first people thought would be temporary places into more permanent camps. As I recall that's when bleak concrete housing began to replace the original tents. Nonetheless, I am still under the impression that many Palestinian refugees really believed they would soon be returning to their homes as stipulated in another major General Assembly U.N. resolution, this one #194, subsequent to the war. Am I correct in thinking this?

Hisham: Yes, resolution 194 assured the right of Palestinians to return home and/or to receive compensation for the agonizing experience they lived through. From 1948 on Palestinians did believe that they would be allowed to return to their homes and property someday.

But at the same time in the 1950s the Arab states exploited the situation and 'Arabized' the question of Palestine. Not only was the country dismembered, but the very concept of Palestinian national identity was under attack. The Egyptians, even Nasser, who was respected throughout Palestine, viewed himself as the supreme leader of the entire Arab world, a world which included Palestine. Certainly the Hashemites viewed themselves as the true owners of Palestine; at least the West Bank. The Syrians as well thought of Palestine as southern Syria.

This was the decade of 'Arabization' and the erasing of Palestinian national identity. From this emerged movements among Palestinian university students looking critically at the political predicament of their country and the Arab world and planning a new course. That new course eventually lead to the formation of the PLO in the early 1960s.

Mark: While the PLO was being established, we in America were preoccupied with the Cold War, the possibility of a nuclear war, economic prosperity, and international hegemony. Interestingly enough, especially now in retrospect, the Kennedy Administration was deeply concerned about the possibility of Israel becoming a nuclear power fearing this would spark an arms race in the Middle East. Meanwhile, I don't believe that either in the 1950s or 1960s that the idea of a “Two-State Solution” was part of the political or ideological agenda of that era. So how did the that idea and the very term “Two-State Solution” emerge from all this?

Hisham: The beginning of the establishment of the PLO had interesting motives, Mark. It was actually the Arab State system that wanted to create the PLO in order to create an impression among the Palestinians that the major Arab States were sincerely concerned for their well-being.

In 1964 the first Palestinian conference was held at which the PLO was born and given legitimacy. At the time it had the support of King Hussein and Nasser; themselves two sworn rivals. But each of them thought they could contain and control Palestinian attempts at independence by working closely with the new PLO, by mid-wifeing it in fact.

In 1965, Fatah, what was thought of then as a kind of left-wing Palestinian political party, was launched. It was born out of Yasser Arafat’s sabotage of an Israeli water project aimed at expanding settlements at that time. Arafat was unconvinced that the Arab State system had the determination or the ability to halt the project, and his actions garnered credibility for the movement.

It wasn't until after the devastating Six Day War that a “Two-State Solution” began to be seriously discussed again and anew. Prior to the Six Day War, Fatah and the PLO had put forth what today could be called a One State Solution that outlined a secular, inclusive state for all. The term and concept of the time was to call for a “Democratic, Secular State” in all of historic Palestine.

At the time many in the Arab world, including many Palestinian intellectuals, were looking to modernization, to secularism, and in fact to the United States and the West despite the roles these countries had played in dismembering Palestine. Accepting the Jews to have rights to live in peace and equality in Palestine, even after what had happened in the 1948 Nakba and then again in 1967, was thought to be a major ideological development. But the idea of giving up most of Palestine and giving legitimacy to a “Jewish State”, especially with millions of Palestinian refugees now scattered throughout the neighboring countries as well as living under Israeli occupation in the newly “occupied territories”, was outside the boundaries of Palestinian thinking.

Chapter IV

Rebirth of the “Two-State Solution,” 1967 - 1976

Yasser Arafat Golda Meir

“There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir,

15 June 1969 in The Sunday Times

“With support from imperialist and colonialist Powers, the Zionist entity managed

to get itself accepted as a Member of the United Nations. It further succeeded...

in deceiving world public opinion by presenting our cause as a problem of refugees

in need either of charity from do-gooders or settlement in a land not theirs...

Our people have had to struggle against British occupation and Zionist invasion, both

of which had one intention, namely, the usurpation of our land. Six major revolts

and tens of popular uprisings were staged to foil these attempts so that our homeland

might remain ours. Over 30,000 martyrs, the equivalent in comparative terms of

6 million Americans, died in the process.”

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat addressing the

U.N. General Assembly on 13 Nov 1974

Mark: Then 1967 came and changed everything. In the years immediately prior to1967, and what would come to be called the Six Day War, where did the idea of the “Two-State Solution” stand in the Palestinian community, Hisham?

Hisham: Let’s remember that when the PLO was established in 1964, and Fatah in 1965, Palestinian thinking revolved around the idea of a single, secular, and inclusive state. For Palestinians the country was always a single unified country and its name was Palestine. Nearly all Palestinians then continued to believe that the country was Palestine and should not be divided. Jews, however, it was said, could live in Palestine as equal citizens. To be clear, in Palestinian thinking, there was no room or mention of any “Two-State Solution” of any kind at this time.

When the 1967 war took place, Israel now occupied all of Palestinian territory, plus the Golan Heights of Syria and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. From the Palestinian perspective at the time, this confirmed the urgency for a one-state solution though that's not what it was then called.

Then the idea was to create a “Democratic Secular State”, and in that sense it was the one-state solution of its day and it remained the case until the mid-1970s. Until then, the PLO completely rejected Zionism and Israel was considered to be an extension of colonialism. The very idea of a partition was rejected as it has always been, and Resolution 242, which was passed in November 1967 by the U.N. Security Council, was also rejected on the grounds that it recognized the State of Israel while only recognizing Palestinians as refugees.

For a few years after the disastrous 1967 war Palestinians were consumed with solidifying their own position and keeping the PLO on its feet. There were some high points and there were some low points during this period.

MAP: 1949 ARMISTICE LINES

MAP: AREAS OCCUPIED BY ISRAEL IN 1967

One of the high points took place in March of 1968 when the Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan, launched a major attack on one of the refugee camps in Jordan. During the offensive, Dayan was quoted saying that he would “have breakfast in Amman, lunch in Damascus, and dinner in Cairo.” At the time the Israelis meant to crush the PLO and even sweep through those Arab countries that supported it wiping out all opposition to their rule through sheer military brute force.

But to Dayan's great surprise his bravado was ultimately defeated by a new generation of Palestinian fighters and in the process Fatah and the PLO garnered immense support across the Middle East. At this time the idea of reclaiming Palestine as a single State was reinvigorated in the imagination of the Arab world – it had of course really been the original Palestinian view from the beginning of the conflict with the Jews.

But then the success against Israel and Dayan was quickly followed by a famous setback for the PLO in Jordan in 1970. This came to be called “Black September”. The most modest statistics indicate that at least 30,000 Palestinians were killed and the PLO was exiled from Jordan to Lebanon. The US, UK and Israel were all instrumental behind-the-scenes in helping the Hashemite Regime to survive.

I happened to be in Amman during that year by sheer coincidence and fled with my family back to Palestine under the cover of very heavy exchanges of artillery fire. The firing was so intense that the sky over Amman was black with smoke.

Mark: Had the PLO won what was essentially a civil war in 1967, what would have happened do you think, Hisham? Would Amman, and the area the British initially called Transjordan, have been returned to the hands of the Palestinians?

Hisham: Yes, of course. Had the Palestinians won that war, the outcome would have profoundly changed history. Officially speaking, for instance, I was born in Jordan due to their control of the West Bank at the time. In other words, there was a total negation of Palestinian identity at that time. Of course, if the Palestinians had won that war, things would have been quite different!

I am under the impression that the PLO was really trapped into that war in Jordan. I don’t think that Arafat, already then chairman of the PLO for some years, wanted that war in any way. I think that after the Arab victory in Karameh, that I mentioned before, there was great anxiety not only in Israel but also within the Jordanian monarchy. King Hussein feared that the Palestinian commando freedom fighters, after Karameh, were now a threat to his own regime. And so I believe he did everything in his power to have the PLO infiltrated by provocateurs and to bring on the confrontation.

Mark: OK Hisham, how interesting! Let’s continue about the 1967 War then. So much more territory was now taken over by the Israelis: the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, and the Sinai Peninsula all fell into Israeli hands. That must have had a tremendous impact on Palestinian thinking.

And then as I was growing up in the American midwest, and first learning myself about the conflict, this was also a period of resurgent interest in the U.N. and with trying to find some solution to what many still thought of as the Israeli-Arab conflict. And that helps explain the famous U.N. Resolution 242 soon after the War and why it took the shape it did.

Hisham: Mark, Palestinians were once again in total shock. The 1967 war was disastrous to say the least; it was more of a six hour war than a six day war. So sweeping was the Israeli advance across the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights that it is hard to recount what happened. My family, like so many, was displaced for the second time -- first in 1948, now in 1967. We ended up in a brutal refugee camp across the river in Jordan, a camp called __________ , and in my entire life I cannot remember a more wicked environment.

Fortunately, we were one of the lucky families to “illegally” return to Palestine after the war. So, for Palestinians, there was more preoccupation with trying to cope with the new additional refugee crisis created by the 1967 war than anything else.

The Arab world was bankrupt and defeated again. Nonetheless, politically speaking, the 1967 War planted the seeds for the resurrection in another form, once again, of the “Two-State Solution”. Back then this idea just refused to die and kept coming back in different forms!

Following the war, Arab countries and Palestinians began discussing the need for an Israeli withdrawal from the newly taken-over territories. So now the 1967 war became the cutoff point for the borders of a possible new “Two-State Solution”.

Mark: Well, what did happen after intense diplomatic efforts was U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. It was agreed on unanimously five months after the war. What was the Palestinian and PLO reaction to that still now famous Resolution, Hisham?

Hisham: Well, complete rejection. The resolution only viewed the problem of Palestine as a problem of refugees and it called for the recognition of Israel without any recognition of a Palestinian State. It was not until after another war in 1973 that the PLO modified its position, introducing a number of important compromises, that the resolution was accepted along with the just 3-line Security Council Resolution 338.

Mark: Not only did the PLO reject U.N. Resolution 242, but the Arab League met in Khartoum later in 1967 and became famous for the “3 No’s:” – No negotiations, No recognition, and No peace with Israel During this period as I recall the PLO was building its power and its legitimacy and preparing the Palestinian people for more struggle and more armed resistance, right?

Hisham: Absolutely. The PLO was really trying to stand on its feet and recover from the war. It moved its headquarters to Lebanon in 1970 after Black September in Jordan. When the 1973 war was fought, the PLO was prepared. The PLO participated on every front; revitalizing Palestinian resistance and gaining recognition and respect throughout the Arab state system. At this time the PLO was viewed by most Palestinians as their sole political representative and they had a new sense of pride and dignity as a result.

The 1973 War was another landmark event because this time the Arabs were not totally defeated as has been the case in 1948 and 1967. While the Arabs were not victorious, they were also not crushed. As a result, not only was Anwar Sadat able to begin negotiations with Israel, but also the PLO was able to introduce a number of new political and ideological positions starting in 1974.

It was in June of 1974, at the Twelfth Palestine National Council, that the PLO passed the “Ten Point Program”. This very important undertaking reemphasized the Palestinian right to armed struggle and the right to the totality of Palestine, but also, most importantly, the program authorized the PLO to establish a “Palestinian National Authority” over any liberated Palestinian territory. This signified the PLO’s movement toward a kind of unspoken back-door “Two-State Solution” at that time, though again it was never called that.

Subsequently, later that same year, the PLO managed to acquire recognition from the Arab League that it was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Key to this was King Hussein’s recognition because until then the Hashemite Republic of Jordan still laid formal claim to the West Bank and Jerusalem.

But certainly the Arab state system, as it was, would never have given such recognition had the PLO not shown willingness to compromise as they did on what was now coming into focus as a possible “Two-State Solution” – though I stress again that is not what it was then called.

Also, and very importantly for Palestinians, in November 1974 Yasser Arafat made a historic address to the United Nations General Assembly in which he unequivocally said that he was willing to contemplate a peaceful solution to the problem of Palestine. In my view, it was Arafat’s critical advocacy and phrasing in that address that made it possible to move toward explicitly discussing and legitimizing a “Two-State Solution” in the years ahead.

Mark: I was in New York on that day when Arafat spoke. I was then a graduate student at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and also the Representative at the U.N. of the International Student Movement for the United Nations (ISMUN). I remember the unbelievable tension and security around the U.N. on that day. I had a much sought-after Consultative Status 1 U.N identification which let me go into the building at any time 24/7 – but not at that date!

At that time, the Americans and Israelis still considered the PLO a terrorist organization and refused to have any dealings with it. Arafat's captivation of the world stage at the U.N. at that time was a very major event – and yes, I think you are right, it had been made possible because of the 1973 war and subsequent evolution of Palestinian and Arab policies.

I also remember my many meetings at that time with Lord Caradon, the former British Ambassador at the U.N. who was often credited with authorship of Resolution 242. I personally learned so much from him at the time about the Arab-Israeli conflict and about his thinking how it could be resolved and why 242 was drafted as it was.

Other major things were happening at the time as well. Henry Kissinger has stepped in after the 1973 war with what became known as his “step-by-step diplomacy”. What was not so clearly known at the time was how Kissinger was manuevering to get Egypt out of the Soviet orbit and into the American one.

During the war there had been a near clash between the US and USSR which culminating in what was called “The Nuclear Alert”. With Israel already having nuclear weapons the Soviets were threatening to use their military power to back up the Arabs.

Then, in the next years came what was called the “Reassessment” of U.S. relations with Israel. Then there was so much talk about a joint US-USSR peace effort with considerable discussion about an international Geneva Conference – which in the end went nowhere.

It was out of all these whirling developments that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat came forward and made what was then his unbelieveable decision to go to Israel himself!

But I'm getting ahead of myself here as I played a special role in what Sadat decided to do But first, Hisham, from the Palestinian point-of-view, what followed Arafat's U.N. appearance and what was anticipated as a result of it?

Hisham: That was a period of great strength and much thinking and rethinking in the PLO. Some key persons were beginning to think about and carefully speak about some kind of reconciliation with Israel, that the conflict could possibly be peacefully resolved after all.

There were two predominant trends of thinking and planning at the time. One the philosophy of the legitimacy of armed struggled to liberate Palestine – that was still the focus of thinking of many in the PLO. Others, including Arafat himself, were moving toward some kind of territorial compromise, and though still it wasn't called the “Two-State Solution” that is where some of the key leaders were going in their own thinking.

But interestingly enough, Mark, the more the PLO compromised its policies in the direction of such a possible “Two State Solution”, the more it seemed the Israelis increased their campaign to crush the organization and assassinate key moderate leaders.

I have to add though that regardless of the ensuing attacks Israel would launch against it, in the decade ahead the PLO continued to actively pursue a peaceful solution which in the next decade of the 1980s would finally come to be called in public “The Two-State Solution”.

Mark: Yes Hisham, there was so much happening in those years. By 1975 I had finished my joint degrees – J.D. In law at NYU and Masters in Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

Then my first jobs were to work as a feature writer at the American Zionist Youth Foundation (AZYF), an affiliate of the Jewish Agency, and then as the International Affairs specialist at the American Jewish Congress (AJC). Then, because of major policy disagreements, specifically about the Palestinian issue, I asked that my name be removed from the big pamphlet I had written but which had been castrated in editing, and I resigned and decided to move to Washington.

And then, in the years after I moved to Washington, I met the first two official representatives of the PLO who had been sent to Washington by Arafat to open a PLO office. I quickly became friends with both of them and they then invited me to Beirut where I met other leaders of the PO including Arafat for the first time.

Dr. Isam Sartawi had been a heart surgeon training with the famous Dr. Michael DeBakey in Texas when the 1967 war broke out. He gave up his medical career, quickly became one of the Palestinian commando leaders at the important Battle of Karameh you mentioned. He then became a leading PLO diplomat and in a very real sense one of the most important original promoters of the “Two State Solution”. For the next eight years, until he was assassinated, he was a close friend and colleague, a friendship that had a major impact on my own life. The other person was Sabri Jiryis, a Israeli Palestinian lawyer who had graduated from Haifa University and who went on to head the Palestine Research Center in Beirut where he invited me to visit a number of times.

And then I know that in the years ahead you too were to become involved in many ways as a student in the U.S. and then as a writer and professor and political analyst.

You know, to put everything in perspective for our readers, I think we really need to talk more about our own involvements as we discuss with each other what as happening during these critical years and how we ourselves were involved.

Chapter V

The Possible Decade, 1976 – 1987

Egyptian President Israeli Prime Minister

Anwar Sadat Menachem Begin

I have chosen to come to you with an open heart and an open mind.... I have chosen to present to you in your own home...for us to win together...the battle of permanent peace based on justice.... I have not come here for a separate agreement between Egypt and Israel... In the absence of a just solution of the Palestinian problem, never will there be that durable and just peace upon which the entire world insists.”

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat speaking in the

Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem on 20 November 1977

Allow me today to define the meaning of peace as we understand it. We seek a true, full peace, with absolute reconciliation between the Jewish People and the Arab People.... Let us not be daunted by memories of the past, even if they are bitter to us all. We must overcome them, and focus on what lies ahead: on our Peoples, on our children, on our common future. For, in this region, we shall all live together - the Great Arab Nation in its States and its countries, and the Jewish People in its Land, Eretz Israel - forever and ever. For this reason the meaning of peace must be defined...We want peace with all our neighbours - with Egypt and with Jordan, with Syria and with Lebanon.”

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin

responding to Sadat's Knesset speech

Mark: Well, Hisham, things did change a great deal in the mid-1970s. Henry Kissinger's “Step-by-Step Diplomacy” after the1973 set the stage, and then in January 1977 Jimmy Carter and his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, took over from Gerald Ford and Kissinger. It was at this time that I first moved to Washington DC . Hisham, where were you and what was happening in your life then?

Hisham: I was still a kid and living in Palestine. This was the decade where, perhaps, all parties except the Israeli radicals, began to realize that establishing some kind of a Palestinian State had become unavoidable. Kissinger and the United States realized, after the 1973 War, that there was no way anymore to cancel out the Palestinians from the political equation. The U.S. had always refused to recognize the PLO and branded it a terrorist group. But even so, in these years the PLO had evolved into a seasoned and credible political organization that had not only survived Black September in Jordan in 1970 but had come out of that conflict with a profound sense of permanence and legitimacy.

It was out of this atmosphere of Palestinian determination and resistance that I believe many concluded that the “Two-State Solution” had to be revived one way or another.

Mark: Well, Hisham, I’m a little older than you and at the time I had just come to Washington after finishing law school at NYU and grad school at Princeton, and spending four years representing the International Student Movement at UN headquarters in New York.

At the time I came to Washington the establishment perspective was a little different I think. Being discussed wasn't a Palestinian State as such but rather some kind of Palestinian “Autonomy” or Palestinian “Homeland”. For some years still independent “Statehood” was not openly discussed and not in political focus. That really happened I think in the 1980s and as a result of what is now called the first Palestinian Intifada which started in December 1987.

As I look back now I think the Israelis in the mid-1970s were still trying to co-opt the Palestinians in the territories so they could avoid dealing with the PLO, and that they were planning and plotting at the time to undermine and destroy if they could the PLO. At the time it was actually illegal for an Israeli to meet or even communicate with anyone in the PLO. When I befriended the two senior Palestinian PLO representatives whom Yasser Arafat had sent to the United States in 1976, I was tremendously chastised by key persons at leading Jewish organizations who warned me that I must break off any contact with anyone in the PLO or else.

This was an extraordinary period of unease and uncertainty. When Carter came to power he immediately publicly championed human rights and self-determination around the world including for the Palestinians.

It was also in these years that I was having quite some new experiences myself. I was invited during that time to make official visits to Lebanon by the PLO as well as by the governments of Jordan, Tunisia and Libya to make official visits. Most importantly for me I was also invited by the Egyptian Government to be their guest for three weeks in Cairo. This then led to my private meeting with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and my playing a role in history leading to his decision to make his historic visit to Israel.

Which brings me to ask Hisham, what was your perspective at this time when Sadat visited to Israel?

Hisham: Well this was back in 1977 and I was fourteen years old and trying to keep up with the events unfolding around me. It was on the occasion of one of the feasts for Muslims that Sadat came to meet with the Israeli leadership and without even the consultation of the Arab states. This caused a great deal of surprise and anguish for Palestinians. Of course Arab television networks chastised Sadat for his action and it became quite clear that Sadat was trying to strike a deal for his own gain. While he was glorified as a peace broker in the United States, he was deeply resented across the Arab world.

Mark: Yet things were very different in those days for Palestinians. You could still travel with relative ease throughout Palestine and Israel, you could easily go to Jerusalem as well. The “bypass roads” and the apartheid structures and regulations had not been implemented yet. And as I recall it seemed at the time that there was still a very real possibility for the establishment of an “autonomous” “Palestinian State”. There was purposeful confusion using the words autonomy and State at the same time. Were the Palestinians in the occupied territories, were you growing up as a teenager ,already thinking of real Palestinian Statehood?

Hisham: Maybe not as a concept but even at that age I could feel the urgency of the times and the politics that demanded a solution to the crisis of the Israeli occupation and I remember listening closely to Sadat’s speech. But first Mark, how did your involvements come about as you were pretty young yourself then.

Mark: Well, even before I came to Washington I had written a few major articles about the “peace process”. I had worked while in New York for the student arm of the Jewish Agency in New York writing essays about different types of Zionism that went to university students around the country. And then I worked as the International Affairs specialist at the American Jewish Congress with a major focus on Israel and the Palestinians.

Soon after Carter became president an article about my writings was published in The Washington Post. Maybe because of this my writings came to the attention of the Egyptian Embassy and I was invited to be their guest in Egypt. There I was introduced to the major Egyptian personalities of the time including: Osama El-Baz and Butros Ghali and other Ministers as well as key journalists. I remember now having a private dinner with then Ambassador Amr Mousa at the Tahrir Club, the Foreign Ministry club near the place that has now become so famous, Tahrir Square.

In fact, I was at Boutros-Ghali's home for dinner with he and his wife, Leah, the very night he was called by President Sadat and told he was being appointed Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. Some weeks later when I was the first person on Israeli TV to tell them that the new Minister had a Jewish wife I remember how shocked and confused Israelis were!

As a result of all this, when I arrived in Israel for a major international peace conference and I told my Israeli hosts of my experiences in Egypt they were quite astonished. Within hours they convinced me to immediately return to Egypt with an invitation for President Sadat to come to the international peace conference!

As unbelievable as it was at the time, a few days later I was meeting alone with Sadat for about an hour and history was about to be changed! But that whole story is for another time.

Less than a week later after meeting with Sadat and the next morning finding my picture with Sadat on Page 1 of Egyptian newspapers, I was at the airport the night he arrived in Israel!

And then I remember his quite eloquent speech to the Knesset and how thoughtful and principled was its content was. Tragically, Sadat was to betray the main points in his speech at Camp David the next year – but that too is a story for another time.

I imagine, Hisham, the Palestinians must have felt completely sold out at that time.

Hisham: The concept of Palestinian Statehood was not developed in the minds of the West then, Mark, although there was an undeclared realization that the continued denial of Palestinian rights was unsustainable.

Nonetheless, when Sadat came to Jerusalem and then signed the Camp David treaty, Palestinians felt that they had lost their most important ally in their struggle for independence and therefore there was a need to prove themselves again, to the United States as well as to Egypt, the Israelis, and everyone!

Consequently, the late 1970s would prove to be one of the bloodiest periods for Palestine as sporadic battles were waged between the PLO and the Israeli army between 1976 and 1982.

Furthermore, the right-wing government in Israel was determined to compensate for the soft power they had to exhibit at Camp David in signing the treaty. They worked diligently during this period to wipe out Palestine’s most influential nationalists leaders and attempted to divide Palestinians from the PLO by forming ‘Village Leagues’ of Palestinian leaders who were thought to be sympathetic towards Israel and living in the occupied territories.

The decade between 1977 and 1987 was one of continued attempts at survival by Palestinians, politically, nationally, and existentially.

This was a period of Palestinian uprisings in Lebanon and Israeli oppression in the occupied territories. Mass arrests of activists and the closure of universities was common place; something I experienced firsthand while at Birzeit University, which was shut down by the Israelis for a total of seven months in 1981 alone.

Yet, even in the face of such oppression and hardship, a Palestinian could still travel to Jerusalem and could traverse Palestine with relative ease. That said, a Palestinian could be arrested for merely caring a Palestinian flag or a book containing the word ‘Palestine’ in it, or even for wearing clothes featuring the colors of the Palestinian flag!. This was the start of the Israeli apartheid-style occupation we see today.

Mark: Your mention of the Palestinian flags triggers a memory which is quite significant looking back I think.

After Sadat's trip to Israel, I attended a major follow-up conference held at the famous Mena House Hotel near the Pyramids in Cairo. The Egyptians had invited the PLO to send a representative to the conference and when I arrived they were flying the Palestinian flag along with the Israeli flag and Egyptian flag.

The Israelis condemned the flying of the Palestinian flag and threatened to boycott the conference unless it was removed. Contrary to the advice of my friend Isam Sartawi at the time, the PLO decided to withhold their representative lest they legitimize what Sadat had done. Nonetheless, the very symbolism of flying a flag and inviting a PLO representative took on a life of its own. As you mentioned, in Israel Palestinians who flew Palestinian flag or even wore its colors in those days were beaten and arrested! In the end, as they were to do so many times in the years ahead, the Egyptians relented, put off not only by the PLO's non-attendance but by the flood of vilifications coming from Palestinian and Arab newspapers and media. Down came the Palestinian flag; and this helped set the stage for Camp David and what was to come.

Hisham: This reminds me of an important episode I lived through in 1980 when I was 17. I was on a bus from Bethlehem to Jerusalem (at that time a Palestinian could do this) and I had some posters on me that depicted a bird trying to fly, symbolic of the Palestinian struggle, when a couple Israeli soldiers came on board and began searching the passengers. When they found the posters I was carrying they threw me out of the bus and forced me to stand on the side of the road for multiple hours. When I returned home after being released I decided not to tell my parents of the incident for fear of them stopping me from traveling to Jerusalem. Unfortunately, some neighbors were on the bus and immediately reported my arrest to my parents. The point of all this is to illustrate the extent of the Israeli crackdown. This was really a period of expansion of the occupation that came in the form of arrests, unannounced house searches, curfews, settlement growth, and increasing violence. You wrote extensively about the decade and I remember reading some of your best work during the period.

Mark: Yes, during the period 1977-1987 I was making regular trips to Palestine every month or two and was writing extensively for various publications including two I was an editor of, The Middle East Magazine in London and the monthly WorldView published by one of the Carnegie Foundations in New York.

And yes, one of the main things I was covering was the occupation in Palestine because I knew most Americans didn’t understand the conflict.

It’s very important I think to remember Carter’s role in this. Carter was kind of forced into the idea of a ‘separate peace’; he really wanted a comprehensive peace and was already referring to a ‘Palestinian homeland’. Carter had convinced Sadat that if Camp David was a success he would make good his promise of a Palestinian homeland upon his reelection.

Of course, that never came to be and one of the reasons for this was that Israel worked hard to prevent Carter being elected for a second term.

I was in Washington and something of an insider at the time. Also, I was Philip Klutznick’s personal assistant for nearly a decade. Phil had been the president of both the World Jewish Congress and B'nai B'rith International and I had the opportunity to write nearly all of his op-eds and speeches that dealt with the Middle East peace process. In fact, Carter appointed Phil Secretary of Commerce, partly in a bid to gain the approval of the Jewish community for his reelection campaign.

One other comment on that extraordinary period. In February of 1979, there was the Islamic revolution in Iran, in March, the Egypt/Israel peace treaty was signed, then in April the Soviets started to get involved in Afghanistan, and by December 1979, the Russians were invading.

All the while, these monumental events were taking place with the backdrop of the Middle East Peace Process and then the fall of Carter.

I think we often view of the present as being the most intense period for the region. But, look at 1979 and 1980.

This brings us to the Reagan era, ushered in by the hostage crisis in Iran. Even though I was traveling back and forth in those days, I was still quite attached to the upper crust of Palestinian leadership and also to the group in Ramallah that was negotiating with different officials.

Meanwhile, you Hisham were then entering university at Birzeit. As you followed the turmoil of the period and the rise of Reagan, what were you and your colleagues thinking?

Hisham: Primarily we were trying to come to terms with the realities unfolding before us. Although survival was key, we were not about to let go of our rights and our dignity. From October 1981 to June 1982, Birzeit was shut down by the Israelis for seven months. One night some roommates and I felt we were in danger of having our apartment raided by the Israeli army so we spent the night away from the university. Sure enough, upon returning to the apartment the following morning, we found it riddled with bullets and the front door completely torn apart. Had we stayed the night, we would have certainly been killed. This was a period of preserving our pride and challenging the occupation. To the same extent that the occupation had hurt us and instilled in us a feeling of despair, it had simultaneously made my generation real heroes. This is, a generation of determination, perseverance, and resilience.

Mark: And in those years your leadership was in Lebanon, in exile. You were essentially on your own. What was your thinking of Arafat? What was your thinking of the PLO?

Hisham: We viewed the PLO in a sanctified manner then. They were our soul political representative and Arafat was the leader who resonated so widely throughout the occupied territories, especially at Birzeit University, the symbolic castle of safe haven for the PLO in the occupied territories.

We viewed the PLO, at that time, with the utmost admiration and we fought vehemently against any attempt to create an alternative leadership to the PLO, including the Hashemite attempts in Jordan or the Village League attempt by the Israelis.

The PLO, to us, was the symbol of Palestinian nationalism and self-determination. And you are right; any meeting with the PLO was illegal during this period and even my own brother spent a few months in an Israeli jail just for suspicion of having contact with PLO.

Jumping ahead a few years, in 1987 as I was trying to leave Palestine to go back to the United States, as doctoral student, I was turned back at the Allenby Bridge for ten days but not told why. On the last day I was told to check with an Israeli intelligence officer in Bethlehem. I was informed by the officer that due to my contact with some people affiliated with the PLO while in Amsterdam a few years earlier that I was being denied access to Jordan on suspicion of PLO affiliation. Fortunately I was able to convince him otherwise and was able to return to the United States.

Mark: Well, Hisham, what you describe explains what happened in 1982. The election of the revisionist Zionists brought about a new era of Israeli aggression towards Palestine and a kind of brutality not seen under the rule of the Israeli Labor Party. The invasion of Lebanon, contrary to the tabloids, was an excursion defined by its goal of destroying the PLO. Simultaneously, Sharon spearheaded the invasive construction of Israeli settlements into the occupied territories and while he acknowledged the eventual need for a Palestinian state, he did so under the pretense that this would be a state largely inhabited by Israeli settlers, as is the reality today thirty years later.

Hisham: Sharon oversaw the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and, as the so called defense minister, presided over the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in September of 1982. And yes, he followed the war with his agenda of settlement building in the occupied territories. This was a very painful period. Every Palestinian, one way or another, had to contend with the occupation. Whether this meant having their houses demolished or their family taken away from them by bullets, Palestinians found themselves forced to live in a kind of hell under the new revisionist regime. If you talked to any Palestinian in the occupied territories during this time you would hear horrific stories of violence and terror.

Mark: We’re living with the trees of the seeds that were planted then. This is when the rise of Hezbollah came about. The American shelling of Lebanon also led to the rise of suicide terrorism. Even the roots of Hamas can be traced to this period due to the lack of credibility in Fatah during the period. When, in fact, did Hamas get started?

Hisham: It is true that what the Israelis did in Lebanon radicalized the society of the region. So, in many ways the rise of Hamas was a natural development given the recession of the PLO’s strength and influence following the war in Lebanon. In addition to this, Israel promoted the development of radical Islamist groups during the war to divide the leadership of the PLO and fuel its rival parties. They even encouraged and approved the increase in membership to the ranks of Hamas hoping Hamas would be a regional ally in the future. I left Palestine for the United States in 1983 but continued to visit regularly and each time I became more and more convinced that the Israelis were doing greater and greater harm and that the prospect of a Palestinian uprising was only a matter of time. When I left Palestine in the summer of 1987, I knew it was only a matter of months before the crisis would explode and sure enough, two months after I left, the uprising broke out. Inspired by the murder of a group of Palestinian workers in the Gaza strip the Intifada exploded with a fury that had been fueled by decades of oppression.

Mark: As I look back on that period it is clear that the Israelis were bent on breaking the will of the Palestinian people. At the same time, they were trying to buy time, they knew that they needed more time to expand the settlements and defeat any prospect of a real Palestinian State. The Israelis were also concerned about the ongoing attempt by the United States to remain the dominate party in the peace negotiations. Furthermore, this was the time of the Iranian revolution and shortly thereafter the Iraq/Iran war in which the United States played a huge role.

And then things changed in a big way again in Washington. Ronald Reagan became President and he brought a whole different team and mindset with him from that of Carter and Brzezinski.

Chapter VI

Personal Involvement Stories, 1981 - 1985

“ quote” Mark Bruzonsky “ quote “ Hisham Ahmed

Mark: Hisham, during those years in the eighties that lead to the first intifada, this was the time when you first came to the United States. I believe you started school in the States a year after the war in Lebanon?

Hisham: That is correct; I arrived in the United States on August 9th, 1983.

Mark: You know, after all of these years, we’ve never really spent the time to talk about the details of your background then and before. What happened to you? There you were in Deheisha, the refugee camp your parents fled to in 1948. The big war in Lebanon had just taken place, Sharon was the Defense Minister at the time, and the Likud was in charge in Israel. What happened in your life? How did you get to where you are now?

Hisham: Well, these were as you mentioned also the prelude years to the first Intifada. I had finished high school in 1981 and scored highest in the country out of 13,000 students. I felt that this was really an important accomplishment for myself and my family and I knew quite well that it held particular significance due to our status as refugees. I worked especially hard in school, in part, because I knew my family lacked the resources to send me to college.

Mark: I want to interject for a minute to connect the dots for those who may not know or remember. You’ve been blind since birth and I’m assuming this made your early academic achievements really quite astonishing.

Hisham: Well, yes, I was one of the only blind students in my school.

Mark: That’s an incredible accomplishment!

Hisham: Well, I felt good about it. My family felt really good about it. Our house was full of well-wishers for more than two months. There was a really exciting sense of accomplishment.

Well, at that time, the operative rules laid out by the Israeli occupation were such that it was not possible for a Palestinian male under the age of 35 to leave and then easily re-enter Palestine. Instead, a Palestinian man under the age of 35 would have to obtain an Israeli issued permit that would grant a one-month leave. The permit was especially popular amongst recent high school graduates who would use it to travel to Jordan and other countries for college admissions.

I was one of those graduates who applied for the permit. Interestingly enough, every student in my class, except myself and one other student (who scored second in the country), was granted the permit. What was also happening at the time was a Jordanian radio broadcast that called upon the highest ten Palestinian students to report immediately to the ministry of higher education, in Amman, to collect a waiting scholarship. I was dying to get a scholarship and be able to go to college.

Mark: In those days the Jordanians, the Hashemites, were maneuvering to see if they could still maintain some control in the West Bank, weren't they?

Hisham: Absolutely, and the Palestinian educational system was more or less totally under the administration of the Jordanians, given the fact that King Hussein was at that time still considering himself to be the true owner, so to speak, of the West Bank.

Mark: And the region was very tense in the aftermath of the war in Lebanon and the subsequent investigations into the historic massacres in the refugee camps.

Hisham: No, not quite. This was still 1981 and prior to the invasion of Lebanon. But you are right; the region was still tense because the Likud government was in place and was aggressively tightening its control of the occupied territories in preparation for the invasion of Lebanon that would come in 1982.

Mark: I understand now. OK, so in ’81 you finished high school, in ’83, you came to the States, and right in the middle was the war in Lebanon.

Hisham: Exactly. Well, I never received the permit to travel to Jordan and come back. But it was so imperative to me that I attend university that I decided to go anyway, knowing I would be prohibited from returning to Palestine for nine months.

Mark: And from what I know of the travel restrictions, they were imposed on the Palestinians to ensure that Palestine’s best and brightest would end up finding employment away from the occupied territories. This was more or less an Israeli enforced ‘brain drain’ on Palestine.

Hisham: Absolutely. Nine months is sufficient time for a person to establish life somewhere else; as a student or as a professional. The Israelis knew exactly what they were doing.

So, before I left, I went to the mayor of Bethlehem, Elias Frej was his name, and he was a well-known Israeli collaborator.

Mark: I met Frej on multiple occasions. Ah ha, this explains why he was always so readily available to meet with American and Jewish representatives, including myself, during that time.

Hisham: For better or for worse, Frej happened to know me very well. When I was in high school, students would routinely choose me to be their representative to the municipality whenever there was an issue; and there were many issues. As a spokesman for my fellow students, I made it a point to give the mayor a hard time.

One time, in 1980, some students and I went to Frej’s office to discuss some issues of concern for us in Bethlehem. When we entered, Frej refused to stand and welcome us into his office. Feeling it my responsibility, as a representative of my peers, I yelled at him to stand up and greet us. I’m sure he did not readily forget me.

Anyways, when I went back to his office in late June of 1981 to ask for his help in obtaining a travel permit, I went knowing that he would never grant me the favor. My words to him were as follows: “I come here knowing that you can obtain the one month permit for me from the Israelis, but I know you will never do this. However, I still come to you because I really want to make a point and I am leaving for Jordan”.

With that, I left for the University of Jordan and applied for law school where I was immediately admitted.

But then I went to the Ministry of Higher Education, arriving at four in the morning to wait for my appointment. Yet the appointment would not come for four days. On the fourth day, as I was approaching the gate of the Ministry, a policeman began attacking the line of people I was in, beating them with a belt.

Unnerved and enraged, I entered the Ministry trying hard to hide my anger. When I requested the scholarship promised to me on Jordanian radio, I was told that it was not available to Palestinians! Without further ado, I was ordered out of the Ministry of Education!

To be honest with you, I felt that the gates of hell had opened! In one moment my ambitions and dreams seemed crushed. There, in the Ministry of Education in Amman, I felt what it was really like to be a Palestinian devoid of a homeland. There I was, with a life of academic excellence behind me in, being told I was unable to go any higher.

Mark: Well, now we know in retrospect, you had become mixed up in the Hashemite quest to put down the Palestinians and to beat them into submission in cooperation with the Israelis, each for their own reasons. The civil war, after which the PLO was expelled to Lebanon, had been just ten years earlier.

 Hisham: Absolutely. And the wound was still warm. I felt that life had stopped and there were no easy answers. I could not return to Palestine and had no support in Jordan.

I lost nearly 15 pounds in the first month of my stay. Although my family urged me to let them try and negotiate my return, I was too ashamed to concede to their requests and felt I needed to solve my problems independently. It was a matter of dignity and pride and no amount of misery was going to change my resolution.

Nonetheless, my family worked out a solution behind my back and I was given the opportunity to receive a scholarship and a half to attend the University of Jordan School of Law.

I had no choice but to accept the offer but, deep inside, I wasn’t comfortable. Exactly that day, and this is one of those human ironies, I went to the University to get my scholarship and as I was receiving my student ID, I learned that my late mother, with a one month permit in her hand, had arrived in Jordan.

When I learned that my mother had arrived, I convinced her to let me return with her to Palestine immediately and give up the scholarship. Looking back, I have never regretted the decision

(this section about Hisham’s mother needs to be better explained – much omitted here because unclear)

The greatest lesson out of this experience was the soul searching it forced me to do.

In a sense the question of Palestinian Statehood and Palestinian rights became central to my existence after the ordeal in Jordan and the crisis of procuring a higher education.

Anyhow, I returned to Palestine where I enrolled at Bierzet University and, within my first year of school, the Israeli occupation shut down the campus for seven months between 1981 and 1982. Their oppressive crackdowns were a prelude to the war in Lebanon and their greater strategy was to crush the PLO and Palestinian nationalism. It was out of this dysfunctional university environment that I again considered how to go abroad for my education.

Mark: Given your blindness, in an era before computers and cell phones and internet, how did you manage to apply for schools outside the occupied territories?

Hisham: Hand written letters. This was a very difficult process and it required me to find professors and friends who knew English well enough to write on my behalf.

 Mark: For the young people reading this book, I hope the can try to imagine and appreciate the challenge of applying to colleges in an era before the internet, especially while living blind in the occupied territories as a stateless Palestinian refugee!

 Hisham: Absolutely. I eventually received admission to Illinois State University and, although it was a huge undertaking and challenge, I went through with my plans and left for the United Sates in 1983. My first two years at Illinois State were arduous to say the least. There was no way I could finance the education on my own, and so, I had to spend a great deal of time applying for grants and scholarships, including loans from Arab Student Aid International. Among other things I even taught Arabic to fellow students to try and subsidize my tuition expenses. There were many mornings I remember waking up, not knowing if I was still enrolled. This was such a struggle for me.

 Mark: When you flew from Palestine for the United States, did you fly out of Amman or Tel Aviv?

 Hisham: I flew from Tel Aviv actually, that was possible then not now.

 Mark: And what were the restrictions? Could you return to Palestine or was there a nine month law?

 Hisham: Its very interesting. First I had to obtain a passport-like travel document from the Israeli occupation which was only valid for two years. After the two years, you could extend the visa while abroad for one more year but if you failed to return or renew the document, you would lose Palestinian citizenship.

Mark: Of course, the occupation was betting on the travel system’s regulations and bureaucracies to keep as many Palestinians from coming home as possible.

Hisham: Yes, and this was the case for many Palestinians who went abroad. Travel document renewals were routinely, and suspiciously, lost or delayed. I made it a point to go back to Palestine at least once every other year to stave off such complications. My first trip back was in 1985 and that trip was made simply to renew my visa without the risk of it being delayed.

Mark: And as I understand it there was another aspect to the travel problems in that many Palestinians were denied travel documents and permits to return for merely being seen at pro-Palestinian rallies or for publicly voicing dissent towards the occupation regime.

Hisham: No doubt about it! A few weeks after I arrived back at Illinois in 1983, I was told there was a group of students calling themselves ‘Students for a Free Palestine’ who were planning on holding a small demonstration on campus. I prepared for the demonstration by putting on jeans and a large jacket; my only experience of demonstrations typically involved tear gas, stone throwing, and live ammunition.

Mark: [laughter]

 Hisham: I was shocked when the demonstration turned out to be ten students peacefully holding signs on central campus! I couldn't fathom it, I couldn’t relate to it, it took me a long time to understand that there was a huge difference between demonstrations in the United States and those I experienced so much at Beirzet University.

Now, back to your previous point. This was exactly the kind of demonstration that could have landed me in immense trouble had it been discovered by Israeli intelligence forces. Such an event did take place in 1987 as I was attempting to return to Palestine. While crossing the Allenby Bridge, I was apprehended by an Israeli intelligence officer by the name of Captain Karim. After dragging me into his office, amidst a hail of insults, he questioned me about a trip I had taken to Poland in 1985 and proceeded to accuse me of meeting with PLO officials at a conference. Although I was able to convince him that I had nothing to do with any PLO affiliates, the confrontation was a reminder of the ever present eavesdropping Palestinian nationals were subject to both in the occupied territories and abroad. At the time it was a crime to have any affiliation with or even contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization. These policies were just another avenue the Israeli occupation used to exterminate the PLO at home and abroad and purposely coincided with their invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

 Mark: And this is where I want to pick up and tell you what I was doing during this period. The war in Lebanon broke out in the summer of 1982, during which time I was a journalist with an office at the Dupont Circle building in Washington DC. We were using Telex machines in those days to send out our international articles; machines that could only crank out sixty characters a minute (not a second)!

I can still remember getting the call from Isam Sartawi, the PLO representative living in Paris who I had befriended years earlier. He called, pleading me to get in touch with Philip Klutznick who was, then the President Emeritus of the World Jewish Congress as well as former Secretary of Commerce, and the man who I was serving under as a kind of aide de camp.

Fearing the imminent Israeli offensive against the PLO, Sartawi begged me to convince Klutznick to immediately come to France to help intervene before it was too late.

I immediately called Phil in Chicago and got back to Isam that Phil would come to Paris in about a week for a major meeting of the World Jewish Congress.

But Sartawi was desperate and urged me to convince Phil to come sooner. He feared the Israelis were going to invade Beirut, kill Arafat, destroy the PLO, and all hope for peace would be lost for a generation if not forever.

So I called Phil again and then called Isam back again wanting to assure him that we now realized the seriousness of the situation and that Phil was trying to change his schedule and come a few days earlier than planned, and that I would come immediately tomorrow and start working with him on whatever he thought could be done.

In those days, in addition to my being a journalist as editor of Worldview Magazine in New York and The Middle East Magazine in London, I was also still representing the World Jewish Congress in Washington, now headed by Edgar Bronfman, and also continuing to be Phil’s personal assistant as I had since the days he was WJC President. At the time I thought I could continue to juggle all of these things and I kind of relished in the unique situation I was in and constantly traveling back and forth to Europe and the Middle East.

When I got to Paris Isam explained to me the overall situation and again urged that Phil come quickly. I made a difficult decision then in view of my different roles and responsibilities, but I'm so glad I did. Worried that they would divert Phil I decided not to inform the WJC higher-ups that Phil was arriving days ahead of schedule. I wasn't really quite sure just how things were going to work out with Isam and what Phil would want to do when he got to Paris. And I knew that Phil also trusted Isam whom I had introduced to him years before. And so I arranged that Isam himself would go to the airport to meet Phil.

Imagine, with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon underway, with the Israelis about to invade Beirut, and with the PLO considered a “terrorist organization” in Israel and the U.S., I found myself arranging with the top PLO representative in Europe that he personally go to the airport to pick up the President Emeritus of the World Jewish Congress.

Then they took the next step and it was brilliant I thought! The two of them came together in Isam's limo to the Hilton Hotel where they simply went into the lobby coffee shop and sat down together. Phil was a very important figure in those days known to everyone in Jewish and Israeli circles. He had also been President of B'nai B'rith International had recently served as the Secretary of Commerce.

So for Klutznick to be meeting publicly with his friend, such a high ranking PLO official, was shocking at the time. I remember the astonishment on the faces of the Jewish representatives from around the world as they first heard that Phil was there in the coffee shop, and then when they learned the identity of the man he was sitting with!

Out of all this, as you know, Hisham, came The Paris Declaration which became the full front page of La Monde a few days later. The declaration was drafted secretly; signed by three of the world's most senior Jewish personalities, written by me, inspired by Isam. Indeed he named it The Paris Declaration and told me that he considered it The Balfour Declaration for the Palestinian People.

The others who signed it were Nahum Goldman, himself the Founder of both the WJC and the World Zionist Organization and the man who took me under his wing right out of law school, and Pierre Mendes-France, the former president of France.

It was the day after Phil's arrival as I recall that the five of us met in Nahum's suite at the Hilton -- Isam and I were the others in the room. And as I said it was Isam who had earned their trust, who convinced them they must act, and they then turned to me to write the first draft of what they should say and have it ready the next day. But as they kept talking I was so ready and Isam's sense of urgency affected me. So after about 15 minutes I asked if I could read them what I had written so far, get their comments, and then I'd have it finished when we met the next day. They wanted to issue calling for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon, recognition of the PLO, and a Palestinian Homeland.

As it turned out, with just a few modifications they approved the Statement right then and there. The heart of it was for an immediate cease-fire meaning no invasion of Beirut, recognition of the PLO leading to Israeli-PLO negotiations leading to a Palestinian Homeland

Later that night Isam came back to the Hilton to see me. What happened then was very personal and moving...but for another time.

Then about midnight Isam's driver brought me back to the hotel where the staff of the WJC was still preparing for the conference. I informed Israel Singer, the Executive Director and at the time my close friend, about the Goldman/Klutznick/Mendes-France Statement – it had no name at the time. At first he thought I was joking. But when I assured him this was for real he went into hyperdrive and in an emergency session of the WJC Board of Directors a few hours later they took the unprecedented step to announce they were “informally disassociating” themselves from the views of their Founder and first two Presidents.

About the same time, about 8am a I recall, Isam and I were meeting with the top Editor at the LeMonde offices; and that afternoon we learned the statement would be featured in the paper about to go to press. Hours later, we realized that it would not only be on the front page but also take up most of the front page.

I didn't know it then but these events and others that were to follow led to a quite vicious political attacks against me by the Israelis and I was soon to be pushed out of the World Jewish Congress as well as other things important to me. But that also is for another time.

Right now, after all this, here’s how Major Frej comes into my story after hearing your stories about Frej.

Hisham: I really think you should talk more about The Paris Declaration and bring Arafat into the story. My goodness, how else would I and the readers ever get to know about?

(must go over the recording here as there is a confusing 2-minute section which also includes more aobut how Hisham Hisham came to America for the first time)

Mark: OK Hisham, but there's so much more about that, really too much for now. I'll just say now that whereas The Paris Declaration is one of the most significant things I was ever involved in, after the special meeting with President Sadat that is, in the days that followed I made a really serious mistake for which I've never forgiven myself and yes it involved Arafat.

But right now, also involving Arafat, let me tell you about something that happened a few months later.

Nahum Goldman died in late August and at that time Nabeel Shaath, someone very close to Arafat, was in the United States. Now Nabeel was considered a businessman having gotten his M.B.A. at the prestigious Wharton School. He wasn't officially PLO and that's why he told me he was able to come and go from the U.S.. But now in retrospect I think Nabeel (today still one of the top P.A. Officials and a very wealthy man) has been working with, and maybe for, the Americans for a long time including back then.

Anyway I remember urgently calling Nabeel and taking a walk with him around Dupont Circle. I told him of Nahum’s passing and that I thought there was an important political and symbolic opportunity right now. That would be to have a PLO representative attend the funeral in Jerusalem.

My idea was to have a representative of the PLO attend the Jerusalem funeral and thus symbolize the possibility of peace negotiations rather than more terrorism and war. I told Nabeel I could quickly arrange with Shaikie Weinberg, Nahum’s personal assistant and soon to be the first Director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, to have the PLO representative taken to the front row at the funeral and asked to speak briefly where he could deliver condolences and respect from Arafat without anyone censoring him.

Nabeel immediately liked the idea; but then of course came the dilemma of very quickly finding an appropriate representative to attend the funeral. It couldn’t be Nabeel, he was too close to the PLO which in Israel was an outlawed organization – even Israelis got arrested just for meeting any PLO official anywhere. I suggested Dr. Hisham Shirabi, a friend, a professor of Arab history at Georgetown University, the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and a man known to be a strong Palestinian nationalist. Plus, though Hisham was a Palestinian exile who had never visited Israel, he was also an American citizen as well as a senior Professor at a major University, and he was as well a strong “supporter” but not official member, of the PLO.

With Nabeel's OK I immediately called and went to see Sharabi. We talked alone for hours in the sunroom of his home. Quickly it was apparently how conflicted, even tormented, Sharabi was by the thought of returning to a country that had exiled him for such an unusual reason which he had never even imagined before. I told him things he knew little about including how Nahum was Ben-Gurion's representative in Washington in 1948 and argued with Ben-Gurion against establishing a “Jewish State” but rather to find some way to coexist in one State with the Palestinians. I told him the complete story behind The Paris Declaration. I told him I'd already arranged that he would be authorized to say words on behalf of Arafat himself. He seemed quite surprised by this but I assured him, assured myself by Nabeel, that if need be Arafat would even call him when he changed planes in Europe. And I tried to convince him that he was not being asked to visit Israel but rather just to make a brief appearance at Dr. Goldman’s funeral as a most welcome guest and then immediately go back to the airport and return to Washington. After all I kept repeating to him, although Nahum was a founder of the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress, he also was a champion of Palestinian independence and what he had done with The Paris Declaration just a few months ago was a kind of Balfour Declaration for the Palestinian people, using Isam's vision.

But in the end Sharabi said he had never been to Israel and would not go...meanwhile time was quickly running out.

So, you’re probably wondering, Hisham about the Frej connection that got me going on this in the first place!

Time was running out Nabeel told me that after talking with Arafat they had decided the PLO would indeed send someone to Nahum's funeral, that person being Elias Frej, the Mayor of Bethlehem.

But this, to me, was a severe blow to the entire purpose of my plan! Frej was well connected to the Israelis and his being at the funeral would not have the startling and dramatic impact that was at the heart of my plan. For Frej to simply come a few miles from Bethlehem to Jerusalem was nothing out of the ordinary in those days, though a Palestinian personality attending the funeral of a major Jewish and Zionist personality would still be unusual.

Nevertheless, this is what transpired. And so Hisham...in this way...which we're just learning about from each other right now...Elias Frej impacted both of our lives in significant ways.

OK Hisham, now to catch up with you again! So, you had made it here to the United States 1983 and were going through the adjustment to life at an American university in the midwest. Now, could you give me a picture of the situation upon your first trip home to occupied Palestine in 1985?

Hisham: Well, when I went back in 1985 I was there for a short visit. I really just had enough time to visit with family and friends. On my home I stopped over in Poland to visit some friends who had visited me in Deheisha. Then I returned to the States to complete my Masters Degree and then begin my Ph.D. Studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara. It was only during my visit back to Palestine two years later in 1987 that I absolutely saw the ingredients for the Palestinian Intifada.

 Mark: What had changed during those years?

 Hisham: You could sense it in the atmosphere that the Likud government was trying to rub the nose of the Palestinians in the mud. Number one, they had finished the process of devastating the PLO in Lebanon and the psychological impact of the Sabra and Shatila massacres was something hard to describe. When we received the news that thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered by the Phalangists and the Israelis in those camps, I cried. The occupied territories were devastated by the news of the massacres and the resulting anger was tangible upon my arrival in 1987.

Mark: Before you continue, let me add my own involvement at the time regarding the horrendous refugee camp massacres. You know, it really takes an event like the writing of this book to bring out the personal side of this subject; an aspect that does much to explain the political developments of the period and which is exactly why we choose to write this together in the first place.

Now you talk about weeping; the massacres you speak of happened in September of 1982. The Paris Declaration for me was the first days of July and I was a couple of weeks more in Paris. Then came Nahum’s death on 29 August as the war continued. One of the reasons they signed The Paris Declaration was to prevent Sharon from marching on Beirut and massacring everybody. You will remember that Ambassador Phillip Habib was involved as President Reagan's personal representative; and even Reagan himself was calling Begin trying to get him to stop Sharon.

I still remember the name of the very famous tank commander who resigned; if he’s still alive I wish to meet him someday. His name was Eli Geva, and he was the youngest Israeli tank commander, the man General Sharon would have given the order to to lead the tanks into Beirut. Seeing this coming Geva said he would not obey such an order, resigned, and was sent to prison.

All of this pressure aimed to stop Sharon from fulfilling his goal of exterminating the PLO once and for all. So then comes the Sabra and Shatilla massacres and here’s my own story. At the time I was close friends with a woman named Taroub Abdel-Hadi. She had taught me a lot because she was not only Palestinian, upper class Palestinian who grew up in Cairo, but her grandfather had been the negotiator with Ben-Gurion as head of the Palestinian Independence Party. She even gave me a book by Ben-Gurion about his talks with Arab leaders, her grandfather foremost among them.

It just so happened that she and I were sitting in her apartment watching the evening news sometime shortly before the massacres. And I just could’t take it anymore, and I broke down in tears. The massacres hadn’t yet happened but it looked like Sharon’s tanks were about to roll through Beirut and they would kill Arafat and destroy the PLO – this had been Sharon's goal from the beginning. I literally broke down in tears anticipating that things of this kind were going to happen.

The remarkable thing was that an hour later I found myself trying to appologize to Ruby (that was her nickname) for breaking down when it was her friends and countrymen who had suffered for so many decades. It seemed so odd that she would be holding and comforting me rather than the other way around.

Then she explained what was happening and why. She told me that I was raised believing that the Jews were moral and that they would never commit atrocities and that my whole life was spent believing nice things about Jews and Israel. Now she said it was my world that was coming apart – not her world but mine. Ever since she could remember, born in exile in Kuwait and raised in Cairo, she had been hearing about the massacres of Palestinians, the millions of refugees, the lies of the Israelis and the indifference of the international community. This had been her reality all her life she said, she had no tears left.

Then it was after the Sabra and Shatilla massacres that Israel experienced the largest demonstrations in its history. A commission had to be formed to investigation and it found that Israel was very much responsible for the tragedies at the camps. They also determined that Sharon himself was guilty and that he should never again serve in any high-ranking government position. So not only was this an intense period for the Palestinians leading up to the Intifada, and for you personally, but this was also intense time for Jews and Israeli’s around the world, and for me personally.

Where were you Hisham when what is called the First Intifada broke out?

Hisham: I was in Santa Barbara, California.

Mark: You were then finishing your PhD?

Hisham: Right; but just a few months before that, I was in Palestine. The Intifada irrupted on December 9th, 1987. I was in Palestine for July and August of that year and it was abundantly clear that something momentous was about to happen.

Mark: Let’s get into that. What happened in the 1980s that created such a flashpoint?

Hisham: Well, as we said in the previous chapter, the extent of Israeli oppression in the occupied territories was mounting on an unprecedented scale. There were more arrests, harrassments, and shutdowns of civil society more than had ever been experienced under the occupation. Adding to the cauldron of Palestinian dissent was the crushing Israeli campaign to end the PLO in Lebanon as you have described.

The PLO’s forced exodus from Lebanon allowed the occupation to tighten its grip on Palestine. There was a very real sense of disparity in the occupied territories. In my view, I would classify the dynamics behind the Intifada under three main headings. The first was the domestic Palestinian/Israeli setting; one dominated by an increasingly violent occupation. Secondly, the regional setting was dominated by an Arab state system that was completely preoccupied with the Iran/Iraq War and which failed to even mention the situation of Palestine following the Arab Summit at Oman in November of 1987. And thirdly, the international system led primarily by the Reagan Administration absolutely disregarded the Palestinian problem and turned a blind eye on the invasion of Lebanon without even proposing a peace initiative. The tension was mounting, the frustration was building, and all that was needed was a spark to set everything alight.

Mark: Before we get to the spark, I want to reflect on those ten years. As you know, I was a little older than you and that was the time when I was deeply involved, traveling back and forth to the region sometimes multiple times a week. Menachem Begin took power in 1977 replacing labor Zionism with Revisionist Zionism. For a lot of people in the world these things don’t mean much, but for a lot of us Jews and those of us brought up learning about Israel and Zionism, this regime change was a big deal.

Then there was the peace treaty of ‘78/’79 between Egypt and Israel which was supposed to lead to a Palestinian homeland at that time. And, although President Carter might have been sincere and Sadat might have been sincere, the Israelis had no intention of allowing an independent state and rushed ahead with settlement expansion and their plan to crush the PLO.

There was a ten year period between the Egyptian peace and the Intifada and in that interim the Israelis sought to end Palestinian nationalism with their invasion of Lebanon. Had the Americans not intervened at the last moment, Sharon most certainly would have marched on Beirut and may well have massacred all the leaders of the PLO. I remember the situation here in Washington and I remember how Reagan was pushed and pushed to halt Sharon’s end goal and allow the remnants of the PLO to flee to Tunis. Then you had the Reagan era in America and the various scandals including Iran/Contra.

So, back to December 1987. You were in Santa Barbara when the Intifada broke out and I was in Santiago, Chile because after all of my extensive traveling I had earned the biggest travel reward in history – thirty days of free flights anywhere in the world on Pam Am and I was using it for th emonth of it was by December.

So, I took the opportunity to travel to as many places around the world as I could so long as they were nowhere near the Middle East. I thought I should use this fantastic award to go to as many places in the world I had not been before, not the places I had gone earning it in the first place.

So there I was in Santiago Chile when the uprisings began and by the end of December I decided that I had to change my plans and go to see the Palestinian uprising. Through a special relationship with a Palestinian woman it was arranged that her relatives would host me and then take me to a refugee Camp. You and I didn't know each other then, and you were in fact in Santa Barbara, but it turned out they took me to Deheishe Camp near Bethlehem, your own home!

Hisham: Amazing. So, you were in Dheisheh in late December of 1987, at the start of the Intifada!

Mark: Yes, I spent three nights in the camp and had an amazing experience. It was a cold winter and I don’t remember ever taking off my parka, not even when I went to sleep in the corner of a room with others under so many blankets. It was a tremendously eye opening experience for an intellectual like me, for a journalist who’d spent most of his time conducting interviews with locals in coffee shops, fancy hotels, and government offices. Seeing the day to day life and listening to the people’s stories and the history of the camp was invaluable. During my last night in Dheisheh, they had a special dinner for me. But there was only special food for me and the oldest man, the head of the big family that gathered as we sat up front eating. The next morning before I left the man came to me crying. I had no idea why until he explained to me that since 1948 when he came to this place, then rocks and tents, I was the first Jewish person who came to his home and asked about all that had happened and showed real concern and sympathy and understanding.

Hisham: This was an eye opening experience. My goodness, at the start of the Intifada, what a golden opportunity.

Mark: Back to the Intifada. You were back in Palestine that summer, midway through your PhD studies it seems.

Hisham: Exactly. It was the summer of 1987 when I was in Palestine and I had serious problems trying to leave the country at the end of my stay. I was turned back multiple times on the Allenby bridge and I was really devastated by the financial and psychological strain it caused me. I would wait at the bridge for entire days at a time before I would be denied the access to cross. You will recall my experience with Captain Karim that I told you about before.

Mark: I assume they were doing this with the hope that you would be convinced never to return again. These delays at the bridge were not mere accidents, there was a real process to them.

Hisham: Yes, it is all systematic and well calculated. I t is a form of psychological warfare so that by the time I was finally allowed to leave, I would have no desire to ever return.

Mark: And anybody who had any nationalist or PLO connections was treated even worse and often jailed…and that explains what they did in Beirut too when they looted the Palestine national archives. I had been invited, in earlier years by Sabri Juryis, the Director of the Palestine Center there in Beirut that contained all the historical books and archives. The Israelis either destroyed or looted everything of Palestinian history to further eradicate the memories of and records of Palestinian nationalism.

Hisham: Oh, absolutely. One of the first things the Israelis did in Beirut was to attack the Palestine Research Center and it was there that Sabri Juryis was killed in the bombing.

Anyways, back to the bridge. After days of being turned away from crossing into Jordan, I finally made the decision to cross the bridge even if it meant getting shot. I started, literally, screaming at the soldiers and told them that I was going to make a phone call to the United States so that people would know what I was being subjected to. I was very lucky that I was able to reach the professor who was my mentor and advisor, Professor Stanley Anderson. Prof. Anderson was very understanding and he contacted a few members of Congress after hearing of my plight. So, when I threatened to call the United States again that day it actually made an impact and after a short time, I was allowed to cross the bridge. Of course, by that time, I had already lost my airline ticket, was in danger of losing my job at UC Santa Barbara as a teaching assistant, and I was also in danger of losing the opportunity to sit down for my Ph.D. qualifying exam. When I crossed the bridge on the way to Amman I was physically crushed and psychologically drained. I remember very well going to the Alia airline office in Amman where I asked to speak with the Director.

Mark: Could it have been Ali Gandour?

Hisham: As a matter of fact, it’s very possibly.

Mark: Of course we didn’t know each other then but I knew Ali and his daughter Raghida and there is quite a story to the family. Anyway, I knew he was the head guy at Alia in Amman in those years.

Hisham: I honestly think it was him. I explained to him briefly about my ordeal at the bridge and of my missed flight. The Director was very understanding and helpful. He found me the earliest flight, indeed, and booked me on it. When I sat down in the plane I took a very deep breath and began to decompress. But I must tell you, I was so fatigued from the crossing into Jordan that when I stood to use the bathroom during the flight, I fainted and collapsed in the isle. I had gone several days without sleep thinking about my future being ruined. My mind was working nonstop and the fatigue of going up and down to the bridge, with all of its uncertainty, truly got to me. Furthermore, I had a very hard time explaining to the medical personnel on the plane why I fainted because I was scared that there could be Israeli or Jordanian informants on board. After sometime, I recovered but I could feel the fatigue on my body and my mind. It was the first time I arrived at LAX without a plan or a person to pick me up. I had no time to plan nor any way to know when I’d be leaving or arriving. This was a most devastating ordeal and I think the Israelis knew full well of the hell I was subjected to as a result of their actions at the border crossing.

Mark: They have so many strategies to deal with different groups, whether it means turning people into collaborators or how to threaten families. The occupation is a well thought-out apparatus that has only grown in complexity since your ordeal the summer of 1987. Back then we didn’t call the Israeli operation apartheid, we called it occupation. This is a terribly important story because it’s not just about you. It’s about the situation, it’s about the conflict, and it’s about how the occupation affected individuals on a day to day basis, and lead to what has come since.

Hisham: Absolutely.

Mark: So you get to the States, and I’m sure there is much more to tell, but how were you treated at the time? Here you are, a Palestinian, at UC Santa Barbara during the first Intifada. Did the events and your presence bring about any interest from the university?

Hisham: Well, the spark that triggered the Intifada took place in early December when an Israeli Jeep hit a Palestinian car full of workers in the Gaza Strip killing all of them. That set off a reaction by the Palestinians resulting in mass protests. Almost everybody, including the Israeli intelligence community, thought that the demonstrations would be a one day event. Yet, the extent of Palestinian frustration was so profound that the protest set the stage for an ongoing and comprehensive Palestinian uprising by all of the people in the occupied territories against the occupiers.

Mark: You know there was an infamous scene at that time. Five years later when I set up the Jewish Committee on the Middle East and we were making a documentary called Palestinian Statehood, a film dedicated to the Intifada, I kept asking to find this footage. Rabin had made a speech saying “We are going to break their bones” and there scene actually depicted Israeli soldiers doing just that, beating defensely young Palestinians with big rocks to break their bones. For many of us this video embodied the occupation in the most literal sense; to break the bones of the Palestinian will. And, no matter how brutal and thorough the Israeli lock-down was during the Intifada, they couldn’t achieve their goals. Something had happened within your own community and I’m not sure how to describe it but you must have an understanding of it. What were the Palestinians trying to achieve by open revolt and rioting?

Hisham: Well, the question is really why it happened. Simply, people had had enough. The Palestinians had given up on those powers that were supposedly trying to bring peace and justice; and so they took matters into their own hands. They were trying to free themselves from the occupation and to establish a Palestinian state on the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem. In other words they were underscoring the notion of the two-state solution. Of course there is a lot more that needs to be said about that.

So, yes, I was in Santa Barbara as the Intifada broke out and it became clear that it was the result of a state of mind and I knew it was going to be big. Rabin’s call to ‘break the bones of the Palestinians’ left me very concerned and clearly, as you pointed out, Israeli soldiers carried out Rabin’s call, turning symbolism into reality. I was very worried for my family. There were no phones in Dheisheh where my family was living and the only people within walking distance were collaborators.

Mark: Your right! I don’t remember ever seeing a phone while was there in December.

Hisham: In an era before the internet, you can imagine how disconcerting it was to hear about the violence engulfing the region. What made me even more nervous was the fact that my younger brother, who’s also blind, was arrested the previous December by Israeli soldiers for 65 days.

Mark: And that was another part of the strategy. I remember hearing stories and realizing that not a single family hadn’t been untouched by arrests and beatings and fears during this period. It was all part of a grand strategy to make people feel helpless and cause them to give up and even become collaborators.

Hisham: The arrest really affected my brother. He owned and ran a small but successful grocery store in the camp and after the arrest, his business was ruined and my family had to go through great expense in hiring a lawyer for him. After his release, the Israeli’s demanded that my family pay a $2000 fine. The entire affair left us broke and my brother with injuries to his stomach that persist to this day.

So, when the Intifada broke out in 1987 I was really worried that my family might be specifically targeted. With the Intifada growing and reports of Israeli brutality increasing, I decided to write a series of articles in the university paper that covered the roots of the uprising and the interplay between the Intifada and the quest for self-determination.

My articles did get some publicity and support and the response from various Zionist student organizations on campus was fierce. They filed complaints against me and even harassed me. But I didn’t flinch. To me the Palestinian cause was an important thing and my articles represented my own struggle in solidarity with the uprisings.

Well, here’s the story in late 1987 and then in 1988. I was working very diligently on my PhD dissertation on American foreign policy and Palestinian self-determination and I wanted to finish now as quickly as I could so that I could return to Palestine in time to be with my people during the Intifada.

I did in fact finish my PhD in record time in November 1988. Immediately bought a ticket to Palestine but before I could leave the announcement came that Israel had shut down all Palestinian universities.

As I needed a way to support myself and my family, I made the decision not to go afterall. This was one of the most important turning points of my life. My family was also adamant that I stay in the United States because they were concerned for my safety. A Palestinian national holding a Ph.D. in political science was not exactly a welcomed sight in the occupied territories at that time (now of course it has little meaning at all).

So, I started looking for a job here in the States. I was nominated to deliver the Ph.D. graduation ceremony speech in June of 1989. I was an excellent student but at the last minute, it was decided that someone else would give the speech. Most likely the cancellation of my speech was for political reasons. I had spent a great deal of time and thought writing it, and so it was a painful psychological blow. Yet, at the same time it helped make the marginalization of Palestine around the world, and especially in the United States, something of even more importance to me to try to do something about. If the Palestinians back home were making this Intifada, what was I now going to do I kept thinking.

Chapter VII

From Intifada to Madrid, 1987 – 1991

“ Quote from”

Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Chairman Palestinian Delegation at Madrid Conference

“ Quote from”

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir

Mark: Hisham, when the Intifada broke out, I know you were in the States and I know your first reaction was to finish your Ph.D. and rush to Palestine, but give me your political analysis at the time. What did you, not just as a Palestinian, but as a political scientist, expect the uprising to lead to? What were you hopeful for and what did you expect?

Hisham: Certainly, I think any Palestinian was hopeful that the Intifada would achieve Palestinian independence and that Palestinians would be granted the right to self-determination. And I believe that Palestinians who were involved in the Intifada all had this objective in mind. It was because of this hope for an independent state that Palestinians from all walks of life, whether they be farmers, teachers, trade unionists, doctors, or engineers contributed their efforts to the uprising. Shop keepers went on strike against the occupation. Everybody participated in their own way to keep the Intifada alive until they achieved their objective of having an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem. The Intifada underscored the notion of the Two-State Solution and, as a matter of fact, more than any other event, put the two state option on the political agenda for the whole world to work on. In other words the Intifada, from a political and analytical perspective, was an opportune moment for the international community to see to it that the Two-State Solution idea was concretized and put into effect.

Regrettably, this is not what happened. While the Palestinians, on the one hand, were going in this [Two-State Solution] direction, other players were going in an entirely opposite direction. The Israeli occupation intensified its crackdown on Palestinians and I can think of no Palestinian family that was not affected in terms of arrest, injury, or killing. The curfews imposed on the occupied territories certainly further abnormalized life for Palestinians. There were more days of curfew enforced on Palestinian villages and cities than there were days without curfew. And I can tell you from personal experience that to be under curfew is the most devastating thing. A Palestinian would not be allowed to look outside of his window; more than once my late-mother was almost killed for simply looking outside the window of our house in Deheishe.

Mark: And you experienced it for days and weeks at a time as I recall. I remember being in Deheishe and only experiencing it for a number of hours and having to sit there without looking out the window, waiting for the loudspeakers to announce the curfew’s end.

Hisham: Absolutely. So, the Israelis intensified their killings, their crackdown, their oppression in the occupied territory and went out of their way to break the will of the Palestinian people. The Israeli Defense Minister, Rabin, had a policy to ‘break the bones’ of the Palestinians and to crush their moral… but it never achieved its objective. The Israeli occupation even went outside of the occupied territories all the way to Tunis to assassinate the PLO’s second in command, Abu Jihad, only a few months after the Intifada broke out. The assassination of Abu Jihad, the Israelis hoped, would represent the symbolic defeat of Palestinian nationalism as Abu Jihad was viewed as the PLO engineer and architect of the Intifada.

Mark: And he was the key contact person. A few years later in 1990 I was invited to meet with Arafat and Shaath in Tunis. I would add one more thing from my Washington perspective. The Israelis saw this rebellion, with all of its international attention, and realized that they lacked the security apparatus to contain it effectively. It’s important for people to appreciate that at the time of the first Intifada the people that lived in Bethlehem and Ramallah could easily go to. The apartheid roads, security walls, and checkpoints did not yet exist as they do today. The construction of this so-called security apparatuses, and the aggressive settlement expansion of the 1990s, was a bold strategy by the Israelis to ensure that no matter how much international and domestic support the Palestinian struggle achieved it would never be able to realize an truly independent state.

Hisham: Absolutely. The foremost objective of the Israeli strategy was to derail Palestinian attempts to establish an independent Palestinian state. Secondly, the Israeli occupation was determined to make the Palestinians feel and believe that their struggle was in vain and that their resistance was bringing them more hardship and calamity than victory. So certainly the occupation regime did everything it could to make Palestinians feel and believe that the Intifada was the wrong choice. The Intifada, as a popular people’s movement, carried on for a long time simply because the ingredients for continuation were there; that is, occupation, oppression, repression, and the deprivation of Palestinian freedom all served as ingredients for a continuation of the Intifada.

Mark: And what you’re saying helps to explain why the PLO, in exile, felt it had to respond to these popular pressures. The historic PNC in November 1988, held in Algiers, was the platform the PLO used to formally declare at that time an independent state in the occupied territories. The thinking among many of us was that the PLO was responding to the popular demands of the people so that they could maintain their position as the “sole representative” of the Palestine people. In other words, the PLO’s declaration of a Palestinian statehood at the height of the Intifada was meant to keep them in the limelight during a period of independent popular uprisings. Am I being too cynical?

Hisham: No, this was definitely the case. When the Intifada first broke out it caught everyone, including the PLO, by surprise. The Israeli intelligence community was caught by surprise and people thought it would be extinguished within a matter of days. Nobody expected the Intifada to become an ongoing process. This is when Abu Jihad, who was well meaning and widely respected, became involved in the uprising. He was, in many ways, the bridge of contact between the Intifada and its participants and the PLO. This is why the Israelis went all the way to Tunis and assassinated him in his house in front of his family.

Mark: We also have to put this into historical context. This was all happening just five years after Sharon and the Israelis that he represented, which was a huge block within Israel, attempted to destroy the PLO and kill off its leadership in Beirut. They were only prevented from doing that by Reagan and his emissary, Phillip Habib, and world public opinion. I suspect that the Israelis thought they had done enough to destroy the PLO by forcing the top leaders to relocate far away in Tunis. So, this is all happening in a matter of a few years and so, partly, the Intifada is a reaction to what happened in Lebanon a few years earlier I think. What’s your own thinking about what led up to the PNC meeting in Algiers and how significant it was? Didn’t it represent an ideological shift as well?

Hisham: No question about it. With the assassination of Abu Jihad in April of ’88, the Israelis expected that the Intifada would stop. They believed that the assassination would be a sufficient psychological, logistical, and political shock for the Palestinians whereby the resulting frustration and despair would stop the uprising.

In reality, though the Intifada became stronger and it went on. That, in my view, compelled the PLO to take the Intifada as a more serious process and to consider capitalizing on the uprisings given their relative isolation after retreating to Tunis. The way to do so was, indeed, to convene the Palestine National Council in Algiers on the 15th of November and yes the PLO was involved in a serious ideological shift; a much clearer shift than ever before.

Previously, the PLO had entertained the idea of a Two-State Solution on a number of occasions since 1974 when it first proposed the Palestinian National Authority Program that sought to establish a Palestinian State on any part Palestine that would be liberated or freed from the grip of the Israeli occupation. Yet in spite of the PLO’s previous moves towards a Two-State Solution, most Arabs would agree that it was the 1988 declaration of independence by the PNC in Algiers that symbolized the most clear and official annunciation by the PLO of its acceptance of the Two-State Solution.

Mark: Was it understood as that by Palestinians around the world and not just the occupied territories?

Hisham: To a large extent it was, and I think the reaction to the PNC’s declaration of independence was really one of euphoria. Nonetheless, there were people, including those present at the PNC, that, although exhilarated by the declaration, were also greatly saddened by the loss of Palestine as it existed prior to 1948.

Mark: As you know, I was close to Isam Sartawi, the most senior PLO representative in Europe who was, himself assassinated in 1983 partly because of the things he was doing with the senior international Jewish leaders whom I was working with. My work at the time was with Nahum Goldman, founder and president of the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress, Pierre Mendez France, former president of France, and Phil Klutnick, who took over from Goldman as President of the World Jewish Congress and had also been President of B’nai B’rith International and U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

What I don’t think you know is that in 1985 I was asked by a congressman to go to see Arafat personally with a plea that he support a peace plan that included a Palestinian State in all the occupied territories that would be presented in Congress. I don’t have to keep it secret anymore, the Congressman was Pete McCloskey, a Republican from California, and he asked me to go and present his ideas to Arafat.

At the time, as you know, Muna and I were together and when found out that Arafat was then in Cairo I told McCloskey we were both going to go to see him right away. I don’t know if you know this, but Muna grew up in Amman and Arafat used to come to her family’s home when she was a little girl. Her father was secretly in the PLO, an educated man with a PhD who had a senior position working for the Jordanian Airlines, and he would meet with Arafat on a regular basis.

So, off we went to Cairo, I don’t remember what month, but it was in 1985. After a few days staying at the Hilton near Tahrir Square we got the call around midnight to get ready. The car arrived about 1am and we were whisked away to an undisclosed palace guesthouse where after an extremely thorough security check we were brought to a room where Arafat was at about 3am.

You may have seen the picture of Muna and I sitting next to Arafat that I published in a kind of auto-biographic article years ago. What the picture doesn’t show is that the top leadership of the PLO was also present in the room with us – about eight persons as I recall.

I presented to Arafat with everyone listening what Congressman McCloskey had told me to talk with Arafat about and there was a discussion regarding an important statement they were then writing and then even asked for the advice of Muna and I.

So, there I was doing that during at a remarkable period of Palestinian history and, in a sense, I think Isam was the godfather of the Two-State Solution pushing Arafat in this direction for years and years. It was Isam who reached out to the senior Jewish leaders, it was Isam who had a relationship with Bruno Krisky, who was then chancellor of Austria, it was Isam who knew Goldman so very well, and it was Isam who knew the former president of France, Mendes-France, also. I introduced Isam to Klutsnick, and they became close friends. Phil and I even went once on a special trip to Canada to see Isam because he couldn’t get into the U.S.

So that was how I was involved at the time. Now you’ve told me of your experience at the time, and how you immediately began writing and speaking about the events that became known as the first intifada, and how you initially tried to leave for Palestine immediately. Now, what happened to your plans? In 1988 you’re still in the states, right?

Hisham: Exactly. As a matter of fact, I finished my PhD dissertation in November of 1988, the very same month as the NPC’s declaration of independence. I was ready to go back and, like many Palestinians I was partly euphoric, partly unclear about what was coming; especially in regards to the declaration of independence which clearly called for the liberation of the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza. Yes, I was ready to go back to Palestine and I packed up my stuff and bought a ticket. But, as I said earlier, the Israeli occupation responded to the PNC declaration and to other overtures by the PLO with harsher oppression, with more crackdowns, with closures of all academic institutions of higher education. I started wondering what I would really be able to do if I went back. It was my family that ultimately convinced me to stay in America out of concern for my life.

Mark: So, for every step toward the Two-State Solution, which not only Palestinians were working towards but also key Americans including Klutznick and McCloskey and former President Carter who had failed so badly, the Israelis became ever more determined to make sure it would never happen. So, the Israelis had to work even harder to quell domestic and international dissent over the occupation. You would think they would have responded positively to the NPC’s declaration as it recognized Israel as a sovereign state.

Hisham: Looking at the whole array of Israeli occupation tactics before, during, and ever since the Intifada of 1987, it became abundantly clear that Israel was, in no way, interested in the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. You’re absolutely right in that the measure of intensity that the occupation undertook absolutely meant to derail any possibility of a real independent Palestinian state next to Israel. The closer the Palestinians came to articulating and pushing for that goal the further entrenched the Israeli system of oppression became.

In the annunciation of the NPC’s declaration of a Two-State Solution by the PLO, the Israelis responded with harsher measures, with more crackdowns, and I think this became quite a nebulous moment in history. On the one hand, the PLO had given up its conviction to the liberation of the whole of Palestine and on the other hand the occupation decided to become more entrenched. On the third hand, the international community, led by the United States, had exploited these developments to try and appeal to the PLO to make more compromises The US ambassador in Tunis held talks with the PLO for the first time.

Mark: That’s right, I knew Ambassador Pelletrau and he was quite a sophisticated ambassador which is why he was designated to do that. That was one of the pay-offs, I think, of the declaration of independence. Furthermore, while the declaration never explicitly stated the call for a Two-State Solution, it was understood that the PLO had abandoned its goal of a single, all inclusive, state.

Hisham: Absolutely. I think this was a major shift. The total ban on communications between the PLO and the United States was lifted by the Reagan Administration. The Bush Administration was about to assume office and there was an understanding that this was quite a critical moment for the whole region. There were so many critical developments taking place simultaneously: the NPC declaration of independence, the end of the Iran/Iraq war, the growing tensions between Iraq and Kuwait, and of course the eventual Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. The whole Middle East region had become more volatile than ever before and, while dialogue between the PLO and the United States was reopened the Israelis remained on the whole vehemently opposed to recognizing the PLO and continued to try to find other Palestinians to weaken the PLO

Mark: Plus we’re ten years down the road from the Camp David Agreement which was supposed to lead to a comprehensive settlement but instead led to the separate Israeli/Egyptian peace which then led to the war in Lebanon War.

I should add that because of the Intifada and my own involvements, I decided that American Jews needed to make a historical statement and in January of 1988, we published in the Nation magazine, signed by 18 of us including Nome Chomsky and Dick Falk, a Statement of Principles declaring support for the Two-State Solution and calling for a change in the one sided US foreign policy of so much money and arms for Israel.

The Statement took on a life of its own and was quickly signed onto by hundreds of people and the further published in the New York Review of Books and other publications, and it appeared in the Congressional Record as well.

So, the Intifada had ramifications of many kinds, both ideological and political, and then came what you mentioned, the Gulf War.

But let’s keep this in context of the Palestinian issue. The Intifada just kept on going and nobody knew where it would lead. The NPC declaration, although powerful in symbolism, didn’t seem to make a huge impact on the course of events. What is your opinion on the repercussions of the declaration?

Hisham: At the time, it led to nothing whatsoever. Actually what happened was the creation of even more frustration. When the Gulf War broke out, it was said that PLO had allied itself with Saddam Hussein against Kuwait but actually there was never any statement by the PLO indicating that they took the side of Iraq against Kuwait.

In any case, the PLO and Arafat were subjected to serious isolation and sanctions by not only the Gulf States but also the United States and the West. Adding to their conundrum, the PLO lost the strategic support of the Soviet Union after the super power dissolved at the start of the 1990s.

It was a bad circumstance for the PLO. The dialogue that had opened up between them with United States did not pay off, actually to the contrary, they found themselves more isolated, facing very serious economic and political troubles, and the Intifada was showing no signs of stopping. I think it was in these circumstances that the PLO started to fall into one trap after another. They became convinced that the only means of solving their problems was through international conferences and negotiations. The first of which was the Madrid Conference in October of 1991. Although the PLO was forced to be part of the Jordanian delegation and not of an independent Palestinian delegation, the Palestinian leadership accepted to go and I believe that this opened the door for opportunistic Palestinian figures to jump on the band wagon; that is, to try and search for a place for themselves of power and priviledges and opportunities.

Mark: Are you referring to the current so-called chief negotiator who has resigned and been discredited so many times and yet is still there after all these years?

Hisham: Yes Erekat was one of them.

Mark: Let me tell you where I was when the Madrid Conference was announced. I was in your country. Were you still in the states at that time, in 1991?

Hisham: Well, in October of 1991, I was in the United States but during the summer I was in Palestine.

Mark: Okay, let’s come back to that because as I have a moment to relate about it. I was sitting in Jerusalem in the offices of the Al Quds newspaper with the publisher, Abu Zulaf, and with the same Saeb Erekat. The three of us were sitting there thinking about the “peace process” (yes it was called the same even then!) and talking my weekly column at the time. And I still remember Erekat getting a phone call that he took on the desk phone. I think the call was from Arafat. He had a huge grin on his face when he said, “I’ve just been told I’ll be on the delegation to the Madrid Conference”. He would be leaving tomorrow he said and his big worry at the time was getting his shirts cleaned right away! Of course, none of us realized at the time that was the role he would play from then until now.

So, you had been back home to Palestine that summer. Was that the first time you had been back since the Intifada began?

Hisham: No, my first trip back was in the summer of 1989 in hope of really finding a job and seeing family but, of course, the situation was really gloomy and when I got out of the country at the end of the summer I felt I was one of the lucky ones.

Mark: Now when you say gloomy, the Intifada was still on, are you just referring to the economic climate?

Hisham: Gloomy in terms of the extent of the oppression by the occupation. So many days of curfew, so many people getting killed, so many injuries and arrests. But the energy of the people was at an all-time high. People were absolutely determined. When I used to walk in Bethlehem in the summer of 1989 you could see the determination on the part of the people to rid themselves of the occupation. Of course, what happened two years later really did something else.

Mark: What did happen?

Hisham: The outbreak of the Gulf crisis. When the Gulf War broke out in January of 1991 there were more confusions. Saddam launched scud missiles on Saudi Arabia and Israel, and while these actions may have just been political stunts and flexing, the Palestinians thought that it could help their cause in weakening the occupation. What Palestinians saw at the time was really interesting in the sense that the moment when a scud would be launched on an Israeli target all Israeli soldiers and settlers would go into hiding. Ironically those were the only moments Palestinians could go outside. When the air raid sirens went off the occupation curfews were suspended and security posts were abandoned.

Mark: Well, thinking back after the war, I still remember those horrible images of the devastation the Americans leveled onto the Iraqi army; those pictures of charred bodies. The Americans knew that they should quickly get behind regional peace talks following their fierce war with Iraq and there was plenty of work to be done. The Intifada was still in full swing and so that was the genesis with James Baker for the Madrid Conference. As you rightly said, the Palestinians reluctantly agreed to join the Jordanian delegation and abandon their own independent delegation. Arafat wisely chose a very distinguished man who was probably a friend of yours and who would later become a close friend of mine -- Dr. Haider Abdel Shafi. What was your analysis at the time when you heard about the Madrid Conference and the arrangements for Palestinian representation?

Hisham: Well, candidly, I was here in the states and I saw the Gulf War unfolding, the tenacious destruction and devastation of Iraq, and I saw the Madrid Conference as the beginning of the demise of the Palestinian cause.

Mark: You could see it as a political scientist and as a Palestinian even then?

Hisham: Absolutely. Yes, indeed. I was fully understanding of Arafat’s need to get Palestinians out of the incredible isolation they were subjected to and the charge that they were allied to Saddam. He had to find a way to get Palestinians out of the profound frustration that engulfed them in the aftermath of the Gulf War and when they saw the extent of the destruction that befell Iraq.

In many ways, the destruction of Iraq symbolized the destruction of Palestinian hopes and dreams and to me this was the beginning of the end of the Intifada.

I was fully understanding of the need to get out of the isolation felt by all Palestinians and by Arafat and the PLO. But on the other hand I also understood why Bush hastened to convene the Madrid Conference and that made me anxious. I think I even wrote a piece about that then stressing that in the same year Bush was involved in the most destructive war against an Arab country he wanted to cleanse his image in the Arab world by projecting to the world that the United States would be the country responsible for bringing peace to the region. Madrid was not chosen arbitrarily, Madrid was chosen for the symbolism it had for the Arabs hundreds of years before and also, strategically, to signify a shift from the historical role of United Nations brokerage of peace to an exclusively American one. It was to symbolize total hegemonic influence by the United States over the Palestinian/Israeli conflict now and for the years ahead. And indeed this is what happened with the subsequent Oslo Agreement and all the agreements that have followed.

To me, while I was euphoric about the declaration of independence in Algiers, I was not comfortable at all with the Madrid Conference. For me, the super power that led the Gulf War could not lead the peace in Palestine.

Mark: I remember in those years I was going back and forth often and I’d be in Jerusalem and I would receive more invitations, like I’d always received, to go to Ramallah and talk to Hannan Ashrawi and her friends, and Hanna Seniora and Feisal Husseini in Jerusalem, about how James Baker was coming again and they were getting ready for him, and then the Madrid Conference, and I too felt that something was not right.

First of all, the terms of reference of the conference, second of all, there wasn’t even a real Palestinian delegation which reminded me of the Mena House Conference after Sadat’s visit to Israel and how the Israeli’s threatened to boycott if the Palestinians were allowed to show up and fly their flag with their own delegation. So, I too, remember being very uneasy and telling my Palestinian friends of my doubts about the conference’s benefit for the Palestinian people. And I was told by many of my Palestinian friends that they were agreeing to go under the flag of the Jordanian delegation because, at the very least, it was a platform for them to voice themselves on an international level. And, as you say, the Madrid Conference was probably the first of many traps Arafat would walk into.

Hisham: Yes, and next time I think we should delve into this very critical period. .

Chapter VIII

From Madrid to Oslo, 1991 - 1995

Yitzhak Rabin quote: Yasser Arafat quote:

Mark: Hisham, in 1991 the Madrid Conference took place. Where were you then and how did you view what was happening?

Hisham: I was a professor of political science at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks North Dakota.

Mark: Not far from my origins in Duluth, Minnesota. How the world turns!

Hisham: Yes, indeed. I was there in North Dakota for just two months before winter set in by late October. Of course, as the Madrid Conference convened it was major news and my immediate reaction was one of skepticism.

Mark: Now I was in Washington. We met somewhere around this time when you walked up to me at a conference in Washington and said you had heard me on a radio program. The Gulf War had taken place the year before and the Intifada was still ongoing. You were a long way from home and the conflict. What was it that caused you to be so skeptical of the Madrid Conference right from the start?

Hisham: There were a number of reasons Mark. Number one: I was not convinced that the Bush Administration, which led the very brutal and devastating war on Iraq in January/February of 1991, could be the same broker of peace between Palestinians and Israelis as they wanted to project in the Madrid Conference. So, that in itself, really, created a very profound frustration in me and in many, many Arabs who saw the extent of the assault on Iraq, notwithstanding Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.

Mark: There is a whole issue there, too, as to whether Saddam was tricked into that…but that is not for this book and has been written about by such figures as Pierre Salinger, former Whitehouse press secretary.

Hisham: Number two: When the Palestinians were asked to go to Madrid they were never invited as an independent delegation, equal to other delegations that participated. They were forced to be a part of the joint Palestinian/Jordanian delegation and so, to me, that meant an infringement on Palestinian independence right from the start.

Mark: Which is exactly the message the United States and Israel wanted to send to the world… the message that Palestine is not an independent state and that it is actually dependent on and connected to other Arab states; in this case, Jordan.

Hisham: Absolutely. This was the introduction of talks that ensured that, no matter the outcome, Palestine would always be an entity under the control of another and here we are so many years later and indeed the Palestinians do not have any real independence.

Number three: in the summer of 1991 I was in Palestine and I witnessed the Intifada still unfolding and I also saw the rise of a local trend in the occupied territories by, in my view, pseudo-intellectuals, who were searching for a role for themselves in the Intifada. That is, intellectuals who, one might say, represented the aristocracy in Palestinian society that was always isolated and had historically nothing to do with the profound concerns of the people.

They were completely out of touch with the real grievances and pain. Yet, nonetheless, they were searching for a role for themselves. As the whole saga of the Madrid Conference unfolded, I was in constant touch with people there and I got the impression that first of all, those who participated in the delegation were not necessarily those Palestinians would have wanted to see represented them…with the exception, perhaps, of the head of the delegation, Dr. Abdel Shafi who you mentioned, who was always considered a very dignified and decent person.

On the other hand some people were trying to go to Madrid for their own personal benefit. Such people wanted to make the trip and to be in the news, and in order to get on the delegation meant that they had to make compromises about the Israelis, sometimes with the Israelis, and they had to sacrifice certain principles. At that time, and at the height of the Intifada, the Israelis would not grant anyone a travel permit out of the occupied territories without “paying” some dues. I knew some of the people who went to Madrid with the delegation and many of them were hardly qualified to be representatives whatsoever.

Mark: In later years I came to know Dr. Abdel Shafi and before he died I did a long three hour interview with him in which he told me his whole story in detail. I have never published it and its still in my video collection. But you were there in Palestine in the summer of 1991 and I was there a few months later, just before the Madrid Conference, and the reason I remember the timing is because of Madrid…. We must have met in the months ahead, in Washington.

As I mentioned before I remember being in Jerusalem in the office of the publisher of Al Quds newspaper, Abu Zulaf, and with us was Saeb Erekat, then the editor of that newspaper. That was when the Madrid delegation was being formed….and now after all these years Saeb is still the “chief negotiator” …even after all his failures and even after all the his political scandals and resignations.

So, there I was sitting with them and I can distinctly remember how he took a phone call and then with quite a grin and excitement announced that he had just been told he was on the Madrid Delegation and that he had to leave immediately and get his shirts cleaned!

So, absolutely, I had the same uneasy feeling at the time…but nowhere near the depth of concern that you had given your firsthand experience on the ground and being Palestinian yourself. But even I knew that something wasn’t right about the way in which the delegation was being organized and I also had no trust in Baker and Bush and the remnants of the Reagan Administration.

In those days, though we didn’t call them this then, the neo-cons were already taking power in various ways in Washington and the Israeli/Jewish lobby was extremely powerful.

So even though we had yet to meet we had pretty much the same reaction and concerns, though I really wasn’t as aware as you already were of the political dangers ahead for the PLO.

Now when Madrid took place I’m sure you were following it as intensely as you could from the snows of North Dakota; how did you evaluate it at the time?

Hisham: Just to say one last word. To me, the Madrid Conference was a corrective measure on the part of the Bush Administration to beautify its image in the Arab World after the havoc it caused in Iraq. As I mentioned before they meant to cleanse the image of the United States after it was viewed so negatively. Sure, people were upset by Iraq’s action against Kuwait, but Iraq was very important for the Palestinians and for the Arabs. Any Arab student who went to study in Iraq could do so free of tuition fees and the country in general was considered a place of academic excellence. People across the Arab World were furious over the devastating war which, many saw as the result of an American diplomatic and then military trap.

Mark: You use the word ‘trap’. Let me remind you of something that you and I wrote in August of 1992, which was I think shortly after we met and when I was attempting to start a publication called ‘Mideast Realities’, this a few years before the internet came and we were able to launch Middleeast.org in 1996. Let me read you this paragraph because the word “trap”.

The Autonomy trap forcing the Palestinians to accept autonomy really goes back to Menachem Begin’s ideological mentor, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the military founder of revisionist Zionism. More than half a century ago, in 1923, Jabotinsky formulated his call for tightening the noose around the neck of the Palestinians until they would eventually accept “national autonomy”, a status in which they would be surrounded by Jabotinsky’s iron wall in a way reminiscent of the way Indians are confined to reservations in the US and blacks were to be enslaved on tribal homelands in Apartheid South Africa.

We wrote that in August of 1992! We were way ahead of the analysis of others and it sure turned out to be true! Now there is not just the ‘iron wall’ but a real wall!

Hisham: This is really, truly, foretelling. This sounds like writing happening today. There we were immediately after the Madrid Conference and a year before the Oslo Accords. This indeed underscores the skepticism I had about Madrid. In December 1991 I made a trip to Jordan to do some research on the impact of the Gulf Crisis on Palestinian and Jordanian workers previously working in the Gulf. Over 400,000 Palestinians were thrown out of Gulf countries following the war, so you can imagine the depth of the hurt for Palestinians.

Anyways, I was doing research and, although it was part of the objective, I asked various people about their opinions of the Madrid Conference. Almost by consensus I was told that this was the continuation of the Nakba (the 1948 Palestinian disaster).

Mark: How interesting for me. You were in North Dakota and going back and forth to Palestine and Jordan, I was in Washington where the delegations would come many times after Madrid and then after Oslo.

Remember there was a period of about two years between the two when Abdul Shafi headed the negotiating team. After Madrid until the Oslo surprise, which even Abdul Shafi hadn’t been told about, I remember feeling alienated from what was happening. As for Abdel Shafi, when Arafat personally told him about it at a special meeting in Tunis he resigned in protest…what a dignified man he was.

I remember the meetings that would take place and I would sometimes go, but I would always have this feeling of uncertainty over the real purpose of the negotiations. These negotiations gave the impression of ‘even-handed peace brokers’ striving for an agreement. There was this uneasy feeling that I had, but I couldn’t put it in perspective at the time, though I knew I felt alienated.

So there we were in ’92 writing what I just read to you on the “autonomy trap”. We actually titled our joint article ‘Rabin’s Autonomy Trap”.

Shamir had been the prime minister at the time of the Madrid Conference and the imagery was that he was kicking and screaming and that he was forced to come to the conference.

I never believed that; I always thought the Americans and the Israelis were setting a trap of some kind and as you say, the key to it was that Palestinians didn’t even have their own flag or their own delegation.

Okay, so comes Madrid and a few years go by without anything happening and then in late August of 1993 there is so-called Oslo breakthrough and then on 13 September 1993 the historic signing on the White House lawn.

As I told you before, more than ten years later I sat down with Abdul Shafi for a very detailed, very lengthy, three hour discussion during which he told me in detail how he felt, how he got the summons from Arafat to go to Tunis, how he analyzed the situation, and how he decided to resign and not even attend the White House ceremony.

Even at the time, it was realized that this event was one of the biggest political, international, spectaculars that had ever taken place in Washington relating to the Middle East. On that day I did the live commentary throughout the ceremony for Canadian national television, for CTV, and I remember expressing considerable doubt that the signing would lead to peace. I felt we were all being tricked and forced to witness a marriage that wasn’t going to last. I even said that on the program right as the 3000 invited guests were on the White House lawn. And indeed among the reasons I had the guts to speak up in this way right on that day was that I had already learned that Abdul Shafi had refused to attend and had in fact left Washington. That really alerted me at the time to something being very wrong.

So Hisham, where were you at that time and what were you thinking?

Hisham: It was a forced marriage. So, in other words, it can be said that this was a flagrant rape in broad daylight.

Mark: And we were all asked to come to watch!

Hisham: And that’s exactly the problem. I was in Palestine. In May 1993, I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to spend the whole year in Palestine. After I was awarded the scholarship I was told that the scholarship was not going to go through because the situation is Palestine was not safe. So, I argued and argued and finally my late professor, Sandy Anderson, intervened and the Fulbright people agreed to revoke the decision of cancelling the scholarship. So, I went to Palestine that summer. The atmosphere was one of great tension and gloominess. There were announcements and rumors that the PLO was going bankrupt and was unable to pay the bills for its embassies and representative offices around the world.

Mark: That was part of the plot. That was part of how to convince and trick Arafat into what happened.

Hisham: That’s exactly the point. So, I knew right there and then that something big was going to break out. Such news would not spread like fire the way it did without serving as a preparation for another move to follow.

Indeed, immediately thereafter, the news broke out that there secret negotiations going on other than the Washington negotiations led by Abdul Shafi. These were secret negotiations held by the PLO, by Ahmed Quria and Abu Mazen in Oslo with Israeli officials to work out a deal.

And, indeed, immediately when that happened very quickly we saw that gathering in the White House garden on September 13, 1993 for the signing of what was called the Declaration of Principles (DOP).

I was watching the news from our house in Deheishe and I was hurting deeply inside. I wanted my analysis to prove wrong but I saw the interconnectedness between my skepticism on the eve of the Madrid Conference and my affirmation on the eve of the Oslo signing in Washington, that the Palestinians were in for a very tumultuous ride in the years ahead.

The atmosphere was festive in the White House but on the ground in Palestine there was so much uncertainty and anxiety. Yes, there were some who celebrated and placed olive branches on Israeli military vehicles in a way to signify the beginnings of a new era. On the other hand, many Palestinians were also hurting. There was the shock that engulfed everybody that there were secret talks going on while Abdul Shafi was leading the negotiations in Washington. He was such a widely respected man in Palestinian society across different political parties and people trusted him; his goals, his intentions, his history. So, for somebody else to be leading these secret talks without the knowledge of Abdul Shafi was itself quite troubling.

Mark: And nobody knowing what those talks were culminating in and not seeing any papers or written agreements is very similar to the period we’re lived through a few years ago with “The Palestine Papers” that were leaked to and published by Wikileaks. They exposed the under-the-table negotiations giving up basic Palestinians rights and being lead by the same group who forged the disastrous path to Oslo – most especially Abu Mazen and Saed Erekat!

Hisham: Absolutely. So, for me, these secret negotiations really rang an alarm bell. And I saw how Palestinian society was really becoming split.

Mark: What was the mood in the camp that day and what was the mood during the following days? From what you’ve told me, people were following the developments very closely and they wanted to believe good would come from the negotiations but, as you said, there was a very muffled sense of euphoria and quite a sense of anxiety.

Hisham: There was anxiety, uncertainty, disbelief, and skepticism due to the secrecy. All of these factors coalesced to create a situation of uncertainty in the minds of Palestinians and in the days and weeks that followed people did not see peace unfolding in the occupied territories. Rather, they saw more road blocks, more checkpoints, and more hardships. The years following the Oslo agreement became a kind of Oslo era and some of the most devastating years in the history of the conflict for Palestinians. Under the rubric of peace, the Israelis used this period to build more settlements, to confiscate more land, and to imprison more Palestinians. And all the while, the Israelis projected to the world that peace was being nurtured and that a new relationship was being built. Of course, this is why we had a second Intifada in 2000-2006.

Mark: Rabin, the “break their bones” General, and the very man who was involved in the ethnic cleansing during the ’48 war, was trying to present himself as the peace maker during this period. Of course now we know that he ushered in the era of aggressive settlement construction and apartheid policies.

All the while the PLO just sat there like a deer in headlights, not knowing what was going on, inceasingly paralyzed, divided, co-opted, and fractured.

The next year I remember, in 1994, you were again in Washington and we sat down in front of a TV camera for what I had begun as Mid-East Realities TV – a weekly half-hour TV program that at the time played on all the public cable channels in Washington and a few other cities until 2003.

I remember how gloomy I was at the time, but even so I was surprised at how much your criticism and despair outdid mine! You didn’t even think there would be economic improvements and you forsaw what the Israelis were going to do. I thought at the time that at least, for sure, economic development in the occupied territories would go forward as it would be in the interest of Israel and the United States to show that there were “fruits of peace”. At least I thought they would want to give the impression to the world that things were improving. But you were adamant that such improvements were not going to be happen and that in fact the Israelis would further pressure, divide, and diminish the very meaning of Palestinian independence and what the Palestinians could even hope for.

Hisham: One would wish that we were both wrong. Really, who wants to see this kind of outlook being translated into facts? Unfortunately, it is exactly what happened and looking back in retrospect, I think those years were among the worst ever for Palestinians aspiring to real independence.

Mark: Let me continue the quote I was reading to you from 1992 because it was so telling and it sets the stage for our outlooks now more than twenty years later and our decision in fact to write this book together.

We decided to do so now because we felt we have to tell the stories we know, the things we were involved in not just reading about, that we have to put everything in perspective, we have to help people understand why the “Two-State Solution” is dead, who and how it was killed, and where that leaves us, where do we go from here?

Also, it is so important now that we stop talking about what’s dead and start talking about what is possible.

So…still looking back…how right we were to use the term ‘autonomy trap’. Here is what we continued to write back in August of 1992:

Even if the autonomy trap springs further shut in coming months and years it remains certain that the flame of Palestinian and Arab nationalism will remain alive and likely to return at some future date in more inextinguishable form. Those who today appear clever in continuing to suppress and brutalize the Palestinians in their quest for independence and national dignity may find in decades ahead that they have, once again, turned the rage of the oppressed inward, creating a furor that will explode in future years with compounded vengeance.

Hisham: Unbelievable! We said that then. I’m so glad you found this and are reminding me now…

Mark: Americans don’t quite remember it but when Osama Bin Laden, in the mid 90’s, started to talk about the American empire and began criticizing its foreign policy, he also stood up for Palestinians. He said that the Americans were preventing Palestinian freedom and independence. Osama Bin Laden, the rise of Hamas, the rise of Hezbollah, the renewal of the Intifada can all be seen as blow back to what we were witnessing and writing about in the early 1990’s. Here we are 20+ years later phrasing things in very much the same way in the sense that there isn’t going to be any just and stable peace agreement…even if Abu Mazen and his PA do sign something again with the Israelis. The Israelis don’t call it autonomy anymore; some of them even use the language of statehood. But everything they do in regard to now long-occupied Palestine is designed to control, co-opt, divide, and get Palestinian agreement to some kind of enforced limited “autonomy”

Hisham: All that is taking place is, indeed, in fulfillment of an autonomy process the Zionists have been pushing for many years now. It has nothing to do with real statehood, with real sovereignty, or with real independence. It means control over land, resources, and people. No matter what words are said or agreements signed there is sovereignty or independence whatsoever in their plans.

Mark: It’s become even worse. In those days, when we were writing what I just quoted from, you could travel from Dhehesia to Jerusalem. It was easy to invite people to visit Jerusalem from Ramallah for a conference or a dinner. I did it all the time when I was there. There were security checks but the ‘by roads and systems of areas and passes did not exist. Post Oslo in fact all of this began happenings..the Israelis planned it all along. Today for instance most Palestinians cannot ever even go to Jerusalem!

Hisham: Yes…and this is all thanks to the Oslo agreements and what follows.

Mark: You know, there was a symbolic moment that culminates this period for me. It took place in 1995 I believe. I believe that’s when the Cairo Conference took place. It was kind of a follow up and consolidation after what happened at the White House. They had the Israeli prime minister, the American secretary of state, Yasser Arafat, Mubarak all on stage. The whole affair was another ‘public rape’ and you might know more of the details than I do. I remember watching it at the time and not being able to recall a single moment in history when so many leaders were on the same stage, with the whole world watching, and one of them refused to sign the agreement that was put in front of him and that had brought them all together. They put the document in front of Arafat and, after looking it over, he refuses to sign it! In fact he got up and walked off stage. Then some moments later somehow they got Arafat to come back out and sign the very document he had just walked away from. What happened at that point Hisham if you know?

Hisham: My understanding is that the Americans and Israelis, as well as Mubarak, were all trying to really force something down Arafat’s throat. It is also my understanding that when the cameras were off, they went back inside and there was a shouting match with Mubarak calling Arafat all sorts of names and threatening him what would happen if he did not go back out there and sign the document! This was happening in Cairo and so maybe the Egyptians felt it would be far too embarrassing if anything else happened.

Mark: It’s amazing. On the Palestinian side, the same people who screwed up, the same people who made all of the negative things possible, the same people who allowed themselves to be raped and pretended it was a marriage (Erekat, Shaath, and Abbas himself) were still at it then…and still now until today!

I understood it was Nabil Shaath who jumped up from the audience and took Arafat behind the curtain and worked him along with Mubarak and others. I can just see Mubarak there screaming and shouting. And I think it was the American Secretary of State who also played a major role.

What a moment in history to culminate the period! . It’s almost as if Arafat’s refusal to sign the document symbolized his realization that things were not working out as he had expected and his refusal was really a symbol of outright defiance in front of the world. For all of Arafat’s failings, he refused to sign anymore documents after this moment…with the exception I think of Hebron…which also turned out to be a disaster.

Hisham: I think Arafat had this conflict all along. On the one hand he believed that he could accomplish something for his people through the negotiations, while on the other hand he saw the occupation deepening on the ground in spite of all his diplomatic efforts and concessions. This was a real inner conflict for him and when he finally refused to sign more deals it was too late. Of course, it was after he stood his ground that the Israelis turned completely against him. Not that it was the first time; they had tried to assassinate him in Beirut and Tunis.

Mark: Well this brings us to the next chapter in both history and our book. Rabin was soon to be assassinated and a year later Netanyahu came to power. And although there is a consistency in Israel policy, there is a different presentation and a different image between Revisionist Zionism and Labor Zionism. In the United States The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was being formulated by the neo-conservative, themselves mostly right-wing Zionists, who were also playing an even greater role in controlling what I call the Israeli/Jewish lobby. Oslo, already a disaster for the Palestinians, was to become even more so in the years ahead. More and more the Israelis kept building and expanding settlements, demolishing Palestinian homes, absorbing Jerusalem…and dividing the Palestinians from each other physically as well as politically. More and more post-Oslo the Apartheid mechanisms were enhanced and the fracturing of Palestinian society escalated.

Chapter 9

False Peace Becomes Disaster, 1995 - 2001

Quotes from Edward Said and Shimon Peres

Mark: Well, Hisham, in September of 1993 there was the very unusual and unique White House signing ceremony with thousands of people and, as you know, on that day I was doing live commentary throughout the ceremony for CTV, the Canadian National Television. Where were you at that time?

Hisham: In September 1993 I was in Palestine, Mark, I had arrived three months earlier to start a Fulbright Scholarship.

Mark: Oh yes, that’s right, and we’ve talked about that. Then you came back to the U.S. the next year and we had a long TV interview just a few days after you arrived in the summer of 1994 as I recall.

I want to remind you of something you said at the time as I interviewed you then: “There are a lot more difficulties than ever before. The psyche of the people has been extremely devastated. Not much has been achieved after seven years of Intifada. If there is an agreement, if there is a peace process unfolding, why is it that the brutalities of the occupation are increasing, not decreasing?”

As I think back on that period, everyone was so euphoric in Washington. The whole atmosphere was one of rejoicing over what was nearly universally heralded as a historic diplomatic feat. The elaborate White House ceremony itself was unprecedented. Everyone was saying and nearly everyone believed that the five year process then started would bring historic peace. But, apparently, the whole situation looked very different to you and the Palestinians actually living in the occupied Palestine.

Hisham: Well, back then at the time of the White House ceremony and then in the summer of 1994, it was really clear that, objectively speaking, there was an unbelievable Israeli victory in the sense that Israel had succeeded in creating the image that it was making peace with the Palestinians and it had succeeded in marketing this posture across the world.

The world really went to sleep thinking that Palestinian/Israeli relationship had been fully reconciled while, on the ground, the Israelis had exploited the situation to further the occupation, to build more settlements, to confiscate more Palestinian lands, and to tighten the noose around the neck of the Palestinians more effectively than ever before.

You know I was really skeptical of the process when the Madrid talks a few years before in 1991. But even so I was always hoping that my outlook would prove to be wrong. However, after having lived in Palestine for a whole year (the summer of ’93 to the summer of ’94) I had ample opportunity to witness the extent of suffering and pain among Palestinians that the occupation caused. While one would have expected the peace process to have transformed Palestinian life, somewhat, unfortunately what happened was the complete opposite. There were more curfews, more imprisonments, and all under the rubric of the so-called peace process. All Israel was doing was furthering the occupation and, all the while, the world was convinced that things were getting better and that peace was at hand.

Mark: What I hear you saying is that an agreement that was supposed to lead to the fulfillment of a Two-State Solution and an honorable, lasting, peace was in reality destroying the very idea that there could be actually on the ground a real Two-State Solution. And while you Palestinians living there could see this clearly, we, in Washington and throughout the rest of the world, were completely oblivious to the real situation and being constantly bombarded with messages assuring us that peace was coming. The whole affair looks, today, more like an elaborate public relations stunt, an elaborate ruse to allow the Israelis to pursue the policies they have carried out ever since and thus in reality to ensure that the Two-State Solution would never come to fruition.

Hisham: I think this is well said. The Oslo Agreement and the Declaration of Principles, signed at the White House, were really meant only to grant the Palestinians a self-rule status and perhaps, after the transitional period, some sort of Palestinian entity, the contours of which were not at all defined, and in reality, controlling not freeing the Palestinians.

In my view the DOP and the Oslo Accords were really meant to deal the severest blow to the Two-State Solution. These agreements were made in fact because the Israelis were worried that the Two-State Solution idea has been gaining more and more support from more and more people.

Also, look at how the process has dealt with the Palestinian people as a whole. It has fragmented and divided Palestinians living in the 1967 occupied territories, and it completely isolated Palestinians living behind the green line of 1948, and it absolutely overlooked dispossessed Palestinians living in refugee camps, in exile, and in the diaspora. Those agreements on top of the occupation stratified the Palestinians in zones, A, B, and C that never existed before. This fragmentation, in effect, meant even more disunity and disenfranchisement…not only political disunity but social and psychological fragmentation as well.

The Oslo Agreement was perhaps the most detrimental political blow to the Palestinian people after the Balfour Declaration.

Mark: But Hisham, this couldn’t have been done without Yasser Arafat and the PLO. This was done with their cooperation!

Hisham: Needless to say, the Palestinian leadership did fall into the trap. Arafat was under the impression that he could achieve something for his people at a time when the international system was not in his favor. The Soviet Union had collapsed, the socialist block had disappeared, the Arab state system was weaker than ever before, and Arab nationalism, itself, was dealt a serious blow after the war against Saddam and Iraq. Indeed, Arafat felt the pressure and knew that the Palestinians were isolated…and he and the PLO were also isolated and nearly bankrupt. And so Arafat miscalculated that the Oslo Agreement could deliver something in the interest of Palestine. I would say that he himself was ambivalent throughout the process, that he had second thoughts all along. As we said before, by 1995 he so hesitantly signed the next agreement, the Cairo Agreement, even at the last minute with all the cameras from throughout the world on him he tried to refuse.

Mark: I was going to bring that up again too, what a moment in history that’s been largely forgotten now. There you had everybody gathered on the stage in Cairo -- the US Secretary of State was there, Rabin was there, Arafat was there, the Russian Foreign Minister was there. It was such a major ceremony and I can’t think of another time in history like this. There with the cameras rolling, Yasser Arafat, after paging through the document, puts down his pen and walks off the stage without signing! This was just an unbelievable moment…but especially now in retrospect how telling, how symbolic!

Hisham, that actually happened there? You’ve been a political scientist in addition to your Palestinian identity and connections; what happened there?

Hisham: Arafat discovered at the last moment that the maps in the agreement put in front of him for signature were not what he had agreed to after such long and arduous negotiations. He really believed that this was deceitful and he knew at the last moment that this was not in fact the agreement that he had negotiated with the Israelis.

Mark: And on top of that, in human relations, if you trust the people you’re dealing with, you act one way, if you already mistrust them totally and then see them flagrantly abuse you again, you just decide to try to say no and walk away.

Hisham: I think this is also well said Mark. What you are saying is absolutely important in the sense that Arafat didn’t even trust some of the members of his own team. He couldn’t even rely on them to scrutinize through the agreement that was presented to him for signature even there at the ceremony when the cameras were rolling. He wanted to look through them himself, and rightfully so. Those who undermined Arafat the most during his life were those who personally advised him around the clock.

Mark: This brings me back to the first Camp David Agreement in 1978 with the Egyptians. As you know, the year before, I had met alone in Cairo with Sadat and played a role in that and as I watched the Egyptians negotiating, I realized how terribly outclassed they were. They were completely outgunned at the negotiation table just like they were in military affairs, in political affairs, and in economic affairs as well.

Sadat too didn’t get the right advice, they didn’t even keep good records, and that’s why his Foreign Minister and close friend, Ibrahim Kamel, abruptly resigned.

To my mind Kamel is really the heroic figure of Camp David although most people have never heard his name.

Ibrahim Kamel was Sadat’s personal friend for forty years, his foreign minister, and the only man Sadat went to after he talked with President Carter and the only man who had the dignity to tell Sadat that the agreement was unacceptable and must studied and spelled out clearly in writing before it should be agreed to.

And so, shortly after the Sadat/Carter meeting, immediately after Sadat told him what he was going to do, Kamel resigned. He was the dignified and principled hero of Camp David and when I interviewed him a few years later years later he told me that he resigned because he knew the agreement was not going to lead to peace but instead to unending war – and how right he turned out to be!

[check transcript here]

The real heroes of this major period in history – again names that many who will read this book will not recognize – are:

Ibrahim Kamel.

Dr. Abdul Shaffi who had been the head of the negotiating team in Madrid and the head of the negotiating team the next two years, who when Arafat told him in Tunis what he was going to do he said it was unacceptable and resigned.

And then Edward Said, the great scholar, who quite clearly after Oslo started speaking up in very harsh tones about the PLO and even Arafat, who he had personally been so involved with.

And you too Hisham were speaking up whenever you had the chance and we had our own chance in the summer of 1994 on the TV program. As I recall you were then a member of Fatah and a young insider in those circles and you, too, recognized that this was not going to lead to what we were being told but was in fact gong to make things worse.

Hisham: It clearly was a travesty, Mark. Oslo was very divisive for Palestinians and was very detrimental to the idea of the Two-State Solution....totally contrary to how it was presented. Furthermore it was obstructive, strategically, for the solution to the Palestinian problem because, while some of the delegation had the interest of Palestine at heart, Oslo was really an Israeli and American affair arranged by and for the interest of their agendas. The outcome was destructive, it has prolonged the conflict, and it has in fact twisted the conflict into new forms that now seem to make prospects for any resolution far less likely. The Israelis used the destructive Oslo era to deepen the occupation and to achieve more aggressive policies within the occupied territories.

Mark: Yes, they started racing to build more settlements immediately with Oslo – the confused PLO didn’t even get a settlement freeze! And the Israelis also started racing ahead with so-called bypass roads, new and much more severe ways to cut off Jerusalem that in effect cut the West Bank region into three sections. What would go down in history in the U.S. as a major step towards peace in the Middle East would end up being a big nail in the coffin of the Two-State Solution. And although the “liberal, progressive” Israelis would say that it was the assassination of Rabin in 1995 that really spelled doom for the Two-State Solution, it should be made clear that Rabin never really intended for there to be a real Palestinian State anyway. He was no peace hero. He was in fact the same man who had begun the ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians back in 1948 and then was the “break their bones” Defense Minister.

Hisham: Yes, Mark, how right you are. Rabin was the same man who infamously started the policy of “breaking the bones” of the Palestinians to force them to succumb to the occupation. He was vehemently involved in the suppression of the first Intifada and he was, of course, the one who approved and signed the DOP and the Oslo Agreement. Even so Rabin’s actions were not fully satisfactory for the extremist, radical, Israelis, some of whom may themselves have been mislead where Rabin was really going. Therefore, in November of ’95, Yigal Amir somehow was allowed to get right up close to Rabin, shooting and killing him.

Mark: I remember the day exactly because a friend of mine with a famous family name, John F. Kennedy, was getting married in downtown Washington at St. Matthews Church. My friend was a distant cousin named after President JFK, and some in the media were confused thinking it was JFK's son getting married and reporters from the Washington Post a few blocks away came running over. Anyway, it was my friend John who told me in the reception line that day that Rabin had been assassinated and it was so shocking at the time.

I agreed with what you said about the assassination but I would embellishment with the following. In order to give this peace process a veneer of legitimacy and to keep people believing in it the Israeli, including Rabin had to present things in a way that looked to some people, especially the right wing, as if Rabin would pursue things toward the Two-State Solution after all. And so there was a five year time frame for this to be brought about, so many thought. Thus, in order to manipulate the public relations of it all, the Israelis around Rabin had to present it in a way that infuriated the right wing, even though they were actually doing what the right wing wanted to be done...i.e. building more settlements, cutting the Palestinians into pieces, and putting nails in the coffin of the Two-State Solution.

Anyway, Rabin paid the price for all the political confusion of the time.

Hisham: Absolutely. I was sitting watching the news with my family at home in Dhehesia that evening. I will never forget that evening; it was around eleven at night and there was breaking news that Rabin was shot and was wounded. Immediately after it was broadcast that he had actually been killed by a Palestinian. Then, gradually, we turned to the Israeli TV and the reporter was crying and announced that it was a student from ______University, Yigal Amir.

Mark: But even the assassination was used for Israeli propaganda purposes. There he was singing the song, the paper with the lyrics, blood stained, in his coat pocket. They manipulated everything to portray Rabin as the champion of peace and that he was killed because he was striving to achieve it!

You and I had already had that long TV program interview together the year before. We had already spoken up about Rabin's treachery, Edward Said had already spoken up so boldly, and it was clear to all of us that the peace process was totally corrupt and Rabin was still the ethnic-cleanser and “break their bones” guy...albeit it now redressed and repositioned to carry out those policies in new ways.

There was no truth, to us, that Rabin was interested in a real “Two-State Solution”. Rather he was pursueng through political trickery the long-time Israeli plan for “Palestinian autonomy”. Oslo, the DOP, and Cairo were all Israeli attempts to institutionalize and beef up the autonomy idea which they had promoted ever since 1967. They must have had ten different concepts and plans to achieve this in those years....going back to the Village Leagues scheme.

Hisham: You know, it goes all the way back to 1923 and Jabotinsky’s article on the “Iron Wall”. You are certainly correct Mark, the peace process was ruptured long before the assassination of Rabin. But let me give you a sense of the reaction that was felt in Palestinian society. I did not speak to Arafat then, but I did speak to a person that night who had spoken with him. According to my source, Arafat’s first reaction that night was one of seriousness and sincere doubt as to whether the peace process would continue. Arafat further said that he would be the next to go. I believe that Arafat believed, right there and then, that that attempt to bring about some semblance of peace was finished. If he had some reluctance before, which he had during the signing of the Cairo Agreement for instance, it was fully clarified after the assassination of Rabin.

Mark: But by that time Hisham, Arafat was trapped into a “Palestine Authority” system with nowhere to go. For years after the assassination he continued going to various conferences and making more deals and concessions – Wye River, Hebron, Camp David 2000, Taba.

As I look back on this I see that Sadat put his faith in Carter at the time, who may have been well meaning, but who couldn’t deliver and who sold Sadat out for political reasons. I’m proud of an article I wrote as Associate Editor of Worldview at the time of the Sadat. I wrote at the time that those including Carter who were marching behind his casket in Cairo, those who sold him out, those who promised him they were going to do x, y, and z; they were his real assassins.

Remember, it was Carter who had promised Sadat and said in public that there would be a complete settlement freeze as part of the Camp David Agreement.

So it was Sadat's friends who sold him out. It was his friends who isolated him, and it was his friends who were responsible for what happened to him. \

Sadat has placed his faith in Jimmy Carter and I think Arafat placed his faith in Rabin and Clinton. When Rabin was killed, Arafat believed his peace partner was gone but it was in the end a fatal mistaken faith Arafat had in the first place.

Hisham: Well, you know, Rabin as “the partner in peace” which Arafat reiterated on almost every occasion was really meant for public and diplomatic consumption. Arafat was a very shrewd politician. I do think he started realizing right there and then that this was the end of it. But you are absolutely correct, on the other hand, that Arafat was locked in to the PA, trapped by it, and furthermore he was surrounded by advisors who were interested, first and foremost, in their own benefits as “Palestinian VIPs!”

Mark: How right you are Hisham. And many of those people are still there in the most senior positions, they still have their hidden bank accounts, and there still continuing pursuing the same self-serving deceptions, and for doing so they are despised by their own people.

Hisham: This is absolutely true and this is why, when Arafat was under siege by Sharon during the second Intifada, I wrote a piece saying that Arafat was under a double siege; one by the Israelis and one by the some of the people around him who made it impossible for any reasonable Palestinian to get to see Arafat at that time. So, since 1995, and even before the assassination of Rabin, I think Arafat started to realize that the negotiations were doomed. It also should be noted that Arafat also so mistakenly had a lot of faith and trust in Bill Clinton; and I think he visited the White House more than any other foreign figure during the Clinton Presidency.

Mark: You're right! He was quite the White House visitor and frequent flyer. Clinton seduced him with promises and the same Jewish Lobby-connected operatives, Dennis Ross and Rahm Emmanuel, who would later served in the early years of the Obama Presidency, who were already in the White House playing Arafat in those years. Ross in fact was the key person who pushed Arafat to another to another terrible agreement, this one being in Hebron in 1997. Where were you Hisham when the Hebron agreement was made?

Hisham: I was still in Palestine and I was at the time observing first-hand how the Netanyahu government was really making things more and more impossible. In regard to Arafat, you could see his reluctance even as he continued taking part in various agreements and talks. The greatest reluctance could be seen in 2000 when he went to Camp David. Arafat did not want to go to Camp David and as a matter of fact he came out in public saying that it was the wrong thing to do. But then of course he didn’t want to appear as the party refusing peace!

Mark: Yes, I too remember watching each agreement get worse and worse, I believe Arafat insisted repeatedly before going to Camp David that no agreement was reachable then. As I remember it, Arafat insisted that he receive from Clinton a statement in writing that if the talks failed the Palestinians, and he personally, would not be blamed. Is this true?

Hisham: Absolutely. But he didn’t want to send the wrong signal to the world that he was refusing to cooperate. It’s this very priority on such symbols that has so hampered Palestinians and made it so possible for them to be manipulated. Palestinians do focus a lot on symbolism and trying to appear reasonable for the world; and often that comes at the expense of hard core political calculations.

Mark: The Western world has psychology experts and they have been used to great effectiveness diplomatically in ‘figuring out’ the mind-set and weaknesses not only of leaders such as Arafat but also of those advising them. It would appear that the Arab leaders have historically done little in the debriefing and psychoanalysis aspect of diplomacy – usually they do not even grasp what is going on!

Hisham: Sadly enough, this is true, I have seen it myself and it is partly the reason why Palestinian diplomacy has been unable to achieve any concrete results.

Mark: Not just Palestinian diplomacy. Arafat was being manipulated not only by Clinton and the Americans but also the Egyptians, the Saudis, and the Jordanians, all of whom rushed to make new and harmful agreements with the Israels as soon as Oslo was signed. Already having a peace treaty with the Egyptians, the Israelis couldn’t wait to get the Jordanian King to do the same. And so all of these parties were also manipulating Arafat at the behest of and in coordination with the Americans and Israelis.

Hisham: Certainly this is why Oslo was the most detrimental, political, blow to Palestinians after the Balfour Declaration. Yes, remember how quickly the Jordanians signed their own peace treaty with Israel. Look at the emerging markets the Israelis had access to in the Arab world following the Oslo Accords. The Israelis had and still have a vision for the regions as a whole. To them the Oslo agreement was a bridge to screw up Palestinian society, for the lack of a better term, and secondly, it was a way to penetrate into the Arab world both politically and economically. There were many bilateral talks revolving around economic issues, water resource issues, and the Israelis really succeeded in using the Oslo Accords to solidify the occupation on the ground and to pursue their interests in the Arab World more than ever before.

Mark: And while all of this was happening, Clinton got himself reelected and into the mess of the Monika Lewinsky scandal which would lead to his impeachment. Tensions were also rising further over Iraq. And in general there was the rise of the neo-conservatives being felt across the US with the PNAC Statement about the New American Century. This same group of neo-cons was also urging the Israelis to abort the Oslo Peace Process and double down on not having any kind of Palestinian State.

And when Netanyahu became Prime Minister, defeating Peres who had taken over after Rabin, there were efforts in both Israel and the neo-con and Isaeli lobby groups in Washington to encourage him to curtain and water down even the self-serving concessions being given to Arafat; they didn’t even want him to hold the symbolic title of ‘president’.

The neo-cons were still worried that the Americans, for their own reasons, might somehow breath some kind of life into the glorified autonomy. There was a period of time when the politicians in Washington were, indeed, looking for a solution that would allow greater autonomy for Palestine, falling just short of sovereignty. And so, the neo-cons and the Bibi people pushed to roll back the more inclusive policies being formulated during the early 1990s. This period was marked by diplomatic stagnation and a flurry of settlement expansionism. As a result, the PA was also to become further discredited and politically isolated during these last years of the Clinton Administration. Is that a reasonable summary Hisham?

Hisham: Absolutely. This was another great accomplishment by the Israelis. I did do a considerable amount of writing on this during the time. For Israel, the idea of deploying so many Israeli soldiers into the heavily populated cities and villages of the occupied territories during the Intifada appears to have been quite costly, financially, in terms of manpower and energy, as well as politically in terms of negative imagery. Here were heavily armed Israeli soldiers battling rock slinging children. So the Israelis were in desperate need to redeploy their forces to the periphery of the occupied zones while at the same time, they needed somebody to maintain basic security and control in the populated Palestinian areas.

Mark: To prevent any further uprisings?

Hisham: In my view, the Israelis viewed the Palestinian Authority as the very apparatus they needed to maintain these basic levels of control in the interior zones. And over the years they have succeeded in co-opting the PA to achieve this need; and in many ways the PA has done a more efficient job at furthering the Israeli agenda then the actual occupation.

Mark: The PA allowed more settlements to be built, allowed the construction of the by-pass roads, and, in general, helped to cultivate apartheid. We never used the word apartheid in relation to the occupation until after Oslo and it never really became part of public discourse until Carter wrote his book in 2005. So, while all of this was happening, what turns out to be said in history to be a peace process was really a death process, instead of movement towards a solution what was taking place was really taking us further away from a solution and thus the tile of our book, The Life and Death of the Two-State Solution.

Hisham: Well, just to end on an anecdote, it is a peace process but it depends on how one spells peace; at this point it should really be spelled ‘piece’.

I remember very well in 1996, I was at a conference in Ramallah and I was giving a paper for a research NGO in Ramallah, and there were a lot of people there talking about the performance of the PA and what was lacking to establish a Palestinian State. I do swear now that it was a slip of the tongue when, rather than saying [Palestinian word for authority] I said [Palestinian word for commodity]. So, everyone was of course laughing then but as I think about it this was really more of a Palestinian commodity than a Palestinian Authority to bring about justice and peace for the Palestinians.

Mark: And it all further lead to the abortive Camp David final attempt by Clinton to get Arafat further trapped and to somehow get him to sign some new documents and legitimize all that had happened during the1990s from Madrid, to Oslo, to the White House, to Cairo and Hebron. And then of course it all led to what we call the Second Intifada.

Hisham: You know Mark, I think Arafat, from his point of view, did everything he could. He was involved in even cracking down on Palestinian unrest to satisfy the American and Israeli powers and show the world that he could be a conventional head of state. He went as far as amending the Palestinian National Charter when President Clinton visited Gaza in the mid-1990s with an elaborate ceremony.

From Arafat’s point of view, he really did everything he could to bring about peace and so by the time he went under such pressure to Camp David in 2000 he was absolutely fed up. To him this was an absolutely historic moment. Either he appears as a traitor to his own people by accepting something far less than an independent state, or he stands his ground as a nationalist who defended his people’s rights.

Of course he chose the latter. And when he came back to Palestine, I was there at the time, he was received as a hero. Of course as well now as we look back this was the beginning of his own demise from the point of view of Mubarak and the Americans, as well as the Israelis. In the years ahead, when Sharon came to power in Israel and Bush in the U.S....but this is getting ahead of ourselves...

Mark: Yes Hisham, when they realized that they couldn’t squeeze anything more out of Arafat, they isolated him, bombed his headquarters, refused to let him leave the destroyed compound in Ramallah, and eventually they stealth assassinated him. But they squeezed as much as they could and I think Arafat, under the spell of Clinton, wanted to be a client leader, like the King of Jordan or the King of Saudi Arabia or the President of Egypt. He thought the Americans would take care of him if he would be their man.

Hisham: I think, to put it differently, he wanted to prove that he was capable of being the head of a state, maybe like the others, but only if this would bring real statehood to his people. When he realized this was not attainable everything changed.

Mark: Fair enough, over the years, you’ve always known Arafat personally better although I met him on multiple occasions, I never could figure him out and his English wasn’t all that good. You'll remember the picture I have from him years ago having have a long dinner – that was actually at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Thinking about what you've been saying I do think your analysis is correct. He really wanted to be the first president of a fully independent Palestine but he wasn’t willing to just possess a title without achieving a real sovereign state.

And that does brings us to our next chapter on Sharon, the aftermath of the aborted Camp David, and a period in history that also brought us 911 which many people feel was, at least in part, a result of blow-back for a generation of American policies towards the Middle East. 

Chapter 10

Sharon Cometh, Arafat Goeth, 2001 – 2006

Quotes From Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon

Mark: Hisham, the 1990s, the Clinton years, were also the Oslo years – years for many of excitement believing that peace with the Palestinians had come and a real however limited Palestinian State was coming. But by the end of the Clinton Presidency it seemed as if all of this was either roadblocked or evaporating

In Clinton’s last years there were the impeachment scandal, the bombing of Iraq, the neo-con ascendancy. Then in 2000 the Israelis finally left southern Lebanon after years of occupation going back to the 1982 invasion. Also, in July of that year, Carter pushed Arafat into attending his own Camp David...memories of Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat still lingering as a success. Literally there is that scene where Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Barak are laughing while push Arafat through the door on the first day at Camp David – so symbolic now in retrospect.

Of course, the second Camp David failed and we should go into that. By September, a few months later, Intifada II was breaking out and by November Bush and Cheney were elected (well actually selected, I'm sure you know what I mean) and in the opening days of their administration there was the Taba Conference.

So let’s go back to this period Hisham. At this point I was settled in Washington, after years of travel to the region. Where were you?

Hisham: Well, from 1993 to 2006 I was primarily in Palestine teaching at Birzeit University. Those were very arduous years following Oslo. Yes Clinton started the Oslo period and, contrary to his desires, he also ended it. He convened that celebratory meeting in the White House garden where the Declaration of Principles was signed on September 13, 1993. And yes that is when it seemed the whole world believed that a new era was about to be ushered in for the Arab/Israeli conflict and the region as a whole.

Mark: Well not the whole world because you and I, as we’ve already discussed a bit, were so skeptical during this period right from the beginning. And Edward Said and a few other were speaking up very critically; as was Haider Abdel-Shafi, the Chairman of the Palestinian negotiating team who even refused to attend the White House ceremony. But you’re right, at the time almost all the major news sources and analysts were saying that peace had finally come and was now irreversible. I recall how often the term “irreversible” was used!

Hisham: Exactly. And in 2000, Clinton’s last gasp it now seems was to bring the Israelis and the PA to the US for what he thought would be David II. But in fact, this conference really dealt a severe blow to the whole Oslo process. It was just the kind of failure Arafat had expected and feared in fact, but he was kind of trapped by then.

Mark: Yes, but in fairness to the Israelis and in fairness to Clinton, they had achieved getting Arafat to sign things in 1993, they’d gotten him to sign in 1995 at the Cairo Conference, they got him to sign more agreements at Wye River and at Hebron, and I think it wasn’t unreasonable for them to conclude that the Palestinian situation was so bad that once they got Arafat to Camp David, one way or another they would achieve another coercive victory. Do you think they were being unreasonable from their point of view?

Hisham: Well, yes, I do think they were being unreasonable but more importantly short-sighted. That is because it was absolutely clear at the time that the Palestinians collectively were getting more and more frustrated with a peace process that had really turned their homeland into a shattered society. Furthermore, when Arafat was so reluctant to sign the Cairo Agreement, when he refused to sign the maps, when he made so many warnings in advance of Camp David, it should have sent a clear signal to all involved that they should not continue to exert such pressure on the Palestinians and expect them to be responsive.

Also, there had already been another major uproar in Palestine in 1998 with Netanyahu now Prime Minister. It was a kind of mini Intifada. Dubbed the ‘Tunnel Intifada’, it was ignited when Netanyahu established a tunnel under the Haram al-Sharif (the area the Israelis call The Temple Mount) sparking mass demonstrations.

The Israeli used brute force to quell the protests and many Palestinians were killed in a single day. This event really symbolized to Palestinians that the peace process had reached a dead end, was over.

But Arafat, as I said, even in 2000, did not want to be seen as the obstructionist figure of the peace process and so very reluctantly he agreed to go to Camp David. But before doing so he repeatedly warned Clinton that no agreement was likely because there had not been satisfactory preparation and agreement, and thus it should at the very least be postponed.

At any rate, Arafat went and was forced into a kind of state of siege. There was so much pressure put on him by the Clinton Administration, the Israeli delegation, and even members of his own delegation. But this time he held firm and refused to do the kind of thing Sadat had done at Camp David a generation earlier.

And then when Arafat returned to Palestine empty handed, he was actually hailed as a hero because he had refused to be seduced and to sell-out. Palestinian society was all in support of Arafat’s refusal to acquiesce, his determination to stand up to the Clinton Administration, and his refusal to compromise on the basic Palestinian rights after so much compromising throughout the 1990s.

Mark: Okay, Hisham, when you explain it that way I find myself in general agreement. But our perspectives were very different because of where we were living and what inputs we were getting. You were living in Palestine and teaching Political Science at Berzeit University and had your ear to the ground every day. I was no longer coming back and forth to the Middle East as I had done so much in the past. I was living primarily in the United States, with the occasional trip to Europe and sometimes short Middle East visits. So, I saw the Americans doing what they were good at: manipulating Arab politicians, manipulating public opinion. And I saw Clinton utilizing his considerable talent for political seduction...as well as the other kind!

Clinton was about to leave office after his two-term Presidency, and he wanted, desperately, to achieve some kind of Middle East success. They had been able to manipulate Arafat so many times as well as other Arab leaders. I mean the very symbolism of Camp David was the agreement with Sadat even though all of his advisers didn’t go along with it and within a few years he was assassinated for it.

So, I think from my perspective, watching Washington operate, it seemed a reasonable expectation that they could get Arafat to concede to Western demands one last time. But then we know what happened when he refused; they isolated him, wouldn’t let him travel, bombed his compound in Ramallah, and eventually poisoned him to death.

That said, I don’t think you went far enough in relaying Arafat’s reluctance because I remember him demanding written assurance from Clinton that he would not be blamed if the summit failed. He never received the assurance in writing, but was offered words of reassurance by Clinton personally, but this changed and got rolled back during the talks. Is that kind of what happened?

Hisham: I think this is what happened, indeed. Arafat had so much hesitation. In a way he really believed in the Clinton Administration and believed that Clinton would be able to bring about some change, after all Clinton was masterful when it came to seduction, as you said, and yes he succeeded in seducing Arafat.

Mark: Like Carter had seduced Sadat. But nevertheless, when you had Rabin and Peres, when you had the Labor party people in power, they played out their own level of seduction towards the Arabs. Then when Bibi took over, I believe in 1997, there was a different tone. The PNAC group of Jewish neo-cons in the States was pushing vehemently to end the Oslo peace process and, at that point, not only was Arafat reassessing the situation but also I think Palestinian society began to become much more skeptical about the negotiations. Furthermore, rather than their quality of life improving during this period, it grew steadily worse as more settlements were constructed, more road blocks were installed, and segregated roads and bypasses became commonplace. It seemed Arafat had nothing more he could give away.

Hisham: And I think Arafat really sensed that his people’s psyche was completely disenchanted and really frustrated with the way things were going. The Oslo era was, in all candor, one of the most difficult periods in Palestinian history. There were much confusion actually. On the one hand there was the impression that peace was unfolding, but on the other hand the reality on the ground was more occupation, more entrenched settlements, and more economic hardship.

I think Arafat understood this very well and for him it was important to do something concrete before Clinton left office but at the same time not to do something that would not be satisfactory for his people. That is why I believe the Camp David talks went the way they did. Of course what Clinton and Barak tried to do was to pressure Arafat to agree to anything under the rubric that the Clinton Administration would be leaving office and that no one knew what kind of policies would follow with the next administration. But even that did not convince Arafat that he should make any more fateful compromises.

Mark: Now in those years you and I were not in touch too much because you were in Palestine teaching and I was here in Washington. But you had your ear to the ground every day. What was the status of this solution which is the theme of or book; what was the status of the Two-State Solution in the mid-1990s through the end of the Clinton Administration? Did people still think it was going to happen, that it was possible or, as I now think in retrospect, did people even then kind of think that the solution was sick and dying?

Hisham: Well, I think increasingly there was a sense that the solution was not real. There were some mixed feelings in Palestinian main stream society that, yes, the Two-State solution still made sense and was possible, but on the other hand, the Israelis were gradually and increasingly destroying the semblance of this kind of solution by expanding settlements and I think this is why Palestinians, in the end, were completely fed up.

Mark: Is that when Hamas began to get more political support from people who were not necessarily religious but were simply fed up with what was happening?

Hisham: That happened, really, later on. But throughout the 1990s, Hamas was still trying to assert itself in Palestinian society, to demonstrate that it was a movement to be reckoned with and also to obstruct an already failing peace process which they considered corrupted and disingenuous.

Mark: Were those the years that you were a Fulbright scholar, writing that monograph about Hamas...one of the the first serious scholarly studies of Hamas as I recall?

Hisham: Yes, that was 1993-1994.

Mark: So you were really clued in. You spent considerable time researching Hamas even though you, yourself, are very secular and have been long associated with Fatah. You must have had a lot of contact with some of the Hamas intellectuals back then. It was so much easier to move around in those days, unlike today. How much contact did you have?

Hisham: I tried to maintain ongoing contact because I was still writing about the organization, then just a few years old, and as such I needed to get firsthand information from their leaders. So every now and then I would try to get to the Gaza Strip, although that became more and more difficult by the day. I cannot remember the last time I got to Gaza for this purpose. Really, increasingly, Gaza was being separated and cutoff from the West Bank even then....another result of Oslo though the opposite had been promised.

Mark: Yes, I remember in those years I could pretty easily still get to Gaza and I would stay at Marna House with Mrs. Shawa.

So we get to 2000 and Clinton fails, symbolizing that the whole decade wasn’t heading in the direction it was supposed to go, Bush/Cheney are selected by the Supreme Court to lead the United States, and then a strange thing happens called Taba. Israeli liberals, once again, claim that they almost reached a deal with Arafat. You were there? What happened then?

Hisham: Well, Taba was the last attempt to rescue the image of the United States as a broker of peace in the region and it did not succeed simply because there was no major change of what was presented to Arafat...just cosmetics. And of course things were absolutely tense on the ground in Palestine.

Mark: Now, I’m not sure if I agree with one point so let’s discuss it. You said it was the last attempt by the Americans to maintain their credibility. I kind of see it as the last attempt by the Israeli liberals, the Rabin types, the Yossi Beilin types, to continue to play a significant role in the peace process.

By this time the Bush Administration was on the eve of taking office and the Clinton people were fading into history. It would have been different if Vice-President Gore had become President...he did after all get millions more votes...but then the Supreme Court intervened.

I think the Israeli left, if we can call it that, didn’t want the “success” of the Oslo period to fade away and I think they wanted to present to the new American administration a track record that they wouyld argue should be endorsed and continued.

Now your view must be a bit different from your vantage point on the ground. But as an American watching from Washington, I was saying to myself, “the Israelis, my former friends, are so desperate that this Oslo/Two-State Solution not collapse because they don’t know what to do if they can’t keeping talking about the Two-State Solution”.

Hisham: Absolutely, there was also great concern in Israel about Sharon winning the elections.

Mark: That’s right; they were trying to save their own political position as it became clear that Sharon would win the election. By the time of Taba as I recall, Sharon had already ignited what became called the Second Intifada.

Hisham: Absolutely. I think Sharon made an extremely shroud tactical move in September of 2000 in that he really wanted to embarrass Ehud Barak. Barak was prime minister at the time and Sharon was the Likud candidate. Sharon declared that he wanted to go to the Temple Mount to symbolize his challenge of Palestinian control of the area and the holy places.

Mark: Let me add to this something that I always pointed out to my Jewish and Israeli friends. As you would walk up from the Damascus Gate and down the big street on the way to the al-Aksa Mosque compound, you would walk down the main street of the Muslim Quarter and there was a big Israeli flag flying from one of the highest buildings. That was a house that Sharon had bought and made one of his residences; and it symbolized that Jerusalem, all of it, was for Israelis. Then at a critical time as you said Sharon made it clear that if he wanted to go to the Temple Mount he could and would.

Hisham: Absolutely. Now, if he bought that house or simply took it over is another question. So, on September 28, Sharon went to the al-Aksa Mosque area and Barak was unable to say no to him.

Sharon knew he would win either way. Had Barak told him no he could not go there Sharon would have won because it would have embarrassed Barak making him look weak and cowardly and unwilling to stand up to the Palestinians. And, had he said OK, as he did, he would have to provide Sharon with many soldiers for protection; which is exactly what he did. He provided Sharon with nearly 2,000 soldiers and police officers who flooded the area of the al-Aksa and Dome of the Rock Mosques in violation of the sanctity of the supremely religious site.

Mark: Did he actually go into the Mosque, or just around the compound?

Hisham: To my knowledge, he did not enter the Mosque but the compound, but that is considered an extension of the Mosque. And so this then triggered the Second Intifada, which is precisely what Sharon wanted.

It was a Thursday and I was teaching at Bierzeit University; I remember the events vividly. The students suspended classes and of course there was widespread anger all over. People were already upset and highly mobilized by the failure of Camp David II and here was Sharon, challenging their feelings and emotions. Everyone took to the streets and there were mass demonstrations.

You know, the whole subject of the Second Intifada is of so much importance because the first few months of the uprising were completely peaceful. Day and night, peaceful marches were conducted; I myself took part in many of them. But the Israelis (especially Barak) really wanted to compete with Sharon by trying to quell the uprisings and stop the resumed Intifada before the elections took place. Barak wanted to demonstrate that he was forceful enough, powerful enough, to stop the Intifada. So he applied so much force, killed so many people, and wounded countless demonstrators even as the movement remained peaceful.

Yet Sharon benefited immensely by the actions of Barak and convinced Israeli public opinion that only he could really take care of the situation.

Mark: And Sharon, representing the neo-cons and the Revisionist Zionists going back to Jabotinsky, was really not so different than Barak, Rabin, and even Peres. There were all on the same team; it was just some were playing good cop and others were playing bad cop. In reality, after the signing of the Oslo Agreement with Rabin, settlements began expanding faster than ever before, even faster than the period under Shamir.

Okay, so Sharon comes to power, Arafat’s in a pickle, and I think, in retrospect, Sharon saw his chance to really pursue policies based on all the tough talk he was known for. He came to power in 2001 and by 2004 both the head and founder of Hamas and of the founder of the PLO were both assassinated.

Hisham: That is correct. Sharon was really adamant to rub the nose of the Palestinians in the mud.

Mark: Let’s talk about that. SheikYassin, the founder of Hamas, had been in an Israeli prison for, I’m not sure how many years, and then he was released to Jordan when the Israelis attempted to assassinate, by poison, Khaled Mashal, who is now head of Hamas in exile. Because the Israelis tried to kill him in Amman, which violated their agreement with the Jordanians and infuriated the Americans, Yassin was released and the poison antidote was rush to Amman to save Masha's life. What year was that?

Hisham: If I’m not mistaken, I think it was in the late ‘90s, maybe 1997?

Mark: Yes I think Netanyahu was already prime minister and in fact that's likely why the assassination attempt was made.

Hisham: Yes, indeed, it must have been 1997 or 1998.

Mark: I remember the scene at Yassin’s hospital bedside in Amman. Yasser Arafat was there, the King of Jordan was there, and they were treating Yassin like a conquering hero. And then Yassin declared, after his recovery, that he belonged back in Gaza. I don’t know how long it took him to get there but he went to Gaza and the Israelis must have facilitated him getting there. I don’t remember what the excuse was, but one day as he was coming out of a Mosque, the Israelis killed him with an airstrike.

Hisham: Yes. There had been an attack on an Israeli target near the city of Ashdod and the Israelis used that as their excuse claiming Yassin as the leader of Hamas was a major threat. They used an Apache attack helicopter to target and kill him.

Mark: What was the reaction at Birzeit and also in your academic, secular, circles?

Hisham: You know, Yassin was an admired man by both Islamists and aecular people and he was considered to be a genuine Palestinian figure irrespective of ideological belief. So there was a lot of grief and really it was a big shock when Sharon made the decision to kill him.

Mark: And he must have had the American okay to do it. At that time he did not have the okay to kill Arafat; that came later, I believe, with the Bush Administration. In those days they had already started to isolate Arafat. They wouldn’t allow him to travel and kept him under house arrest in Ramallah, and they even bombed his compound and all that was left was him living in a single room. So, you were still there in that period not far away from Ramallah in fact, at Birzeit. Maybe you were even living in Ramallah at the time?

Hisham: Yes. I was very close to the Arafat headquarters and could even hear the shelling from where I was living. Those were nightmarish times from the moment Sharon took office as prime minister. Palestinians were not caught by surprise and knew that very difficult days were coming, but even so how could this slaughterer of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres now so publicly become the Israeli Prime Minister and do what he was doing?

Mark: What a very important point to remind people. Sharon had been found guilty by a special Israeli Government Commission to be indirectly responsible for the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla. There were huge anti-Sharon demonstrations at the time. The Commission even stated Sharon should never again be able to hold high public office. However, as the Israeli Government has purposefully set up the Commission without legal authority, its findings an recommendations did not have the force of law. And so Sharon would spend the next twenty years maneuvering his way into politics constantly aiming to become Prime Minister, which he eventually did.

Hisham: So, when he assumed office, he really upped the level of tension, even using F-16’s to bomb heavily populated Palestinian towns, cities, and PA offices as I recall. I think his assumption of office was also a turning point in the tactics used by the Palestinians in the Intifada. At the time he took office the Intifada was largely peaceful; but then we started seeing a shift towards violent means.

Mark: Isn’t that what Sharon wanted and provoked?

Hisham: Well, to some extent, yes. But perhaps it is much easier for one to say now that the Palestinians should not have been lured into this. But on the other hand, it was quite difficult for the society to really maintain its calm when so many people were getting killed and injured. And, of course, what Palestinians had in terms of military means were modest by all means short of suicide bombings.

Mark: Sharon was setting the stage and he knew it. He was using the Intifada and he was using the suicide bombers, of which there were very few actually, to capitalize on public fear and then to have the excuse to start to build his wall. I think the wall symbolized, for him making Vladimir Jabotinsky’s ideology of the ‘iron wall’ a reality. It also symbolized I think, regardless of what was said in public, that Sharon was bringing an end to the possibility of a real Two-State Solution. The wall really had little to do with protecting Israelis from terrorism and much more to do with imprisoning and dividing Palestinians from each other.

Hisham: Absolutely. He started the wall and imposed a much tighter siege on Arafat in the Muqata. Every now and then there was shelling, tanks, and airstrikes on Arafat’s compound and surrounding offices. Finally, Arafat was living in a couple rooms surrounded by ruble and devastation. Of course, Arafat was not allowed to leave the Muqata at all; it was worse than house arrest. Sharon would not have been able to get away with the siege without the approval of the Bush/Cheney Administration and also Mubarak of Egypt.

Mark: Yes they had to have approved, especially because the military attacks could have killed Arafat a number of times. And so Arafat was terribly weakened, he had lost a lot of support, and his health was weakening. At that point though we may never be able to prove it, but at that point some plot to poison him and kill him began to unfold and I wonder, now with some years of retrospect, if you still believe he was assassinated? What were your thoughts at the time and what are your opinions now?

Hisham: Well, to be honest, and I wasn’t foretelling the future, I knew that there was a physical assassination coming before it actually happened. Before the actual assassination of Arafat, there were multiple political assassinations of the man by way of a concerted media campaign spreading all over the region. Only Arafat was to be blamed for corruption and only Arafat was to be blamed for all the hardships and crises the Palestinians endured. There was a huge campaign to diminish and discredit him.

I published an extensive article about this, which was translated into German actually, where I outlined three examples of crises that were used to politically assassinate Arafat in preparation for the real thing. In many ways these political attacks prepared the Palestinian psyche subconsciously to ensure that there would be no crisis in the wake of the real assassination.

The first example was the siege of the Nativity Church in Bethlehem. Now, I was on the scene and almost became one of the people trapped in the church until the very last moment when something inside of me, at one-thirty in the morning, told me not to go inside.

Mark: Remind people what happened and I’ll remind people that the camp where you were born, Deheisha, is just a few miles away from Bethlehem.

Hisham: You’re exactly right. To go through the whole story. At the time I was in Ramallah when it Bethlehem was under serious siege and attack and I needed to get to my family in Bethlehem because, literally, they ran out of money. So, the question was how to get from Ramallah to Bethlehem, and that was not easy to do.

Mark: We also need to add that a few years earlier it was a fifteen minute drive from Ramallah to Jerusalem and another fifteen minute drive to Bethlehem.

Hisham: At the most! Exactly.

Mark: But now it’s like going to another country!

Hisham: Harder than that. Because of the siege, there were no cars travelling from Ramallah so my friend and I had to walk up mountainous roads and by the time we arrived on the outskirts of Bethlehem, on the side of the Valley of Fire road, the town, itself, had fallen under siege. The only way we could get inside the city was by stowing away on the roof of a garbage truck.

At any rate, on the night of the siege of the Nativity Church, I was in Nativity Square at the Bethlehem Municipality media office to distribute information. It was around 1:30 in the morning and I could sense that something was going to happen so I stopped myself from going into the Church. That was a night when I almost got killed because a helicopter detected me and another person that was with me and began shooting at us. We had to hide under a building to save ourselves but we did sustain minor wounds from the concrete that was being torn up around us by the helicopter’s machine gun rounds. It was a moment of sheer horror because we were almost dead sure that were going to die. But eventually we succeeded in getting to a friend’s house where we stayed for thirteen days. I was never able to reach my family’s house. It was a brutal period for Palestinians and many people did get killed inside and around the church.

Mark: The very symbolism of the church, where history records that Christ was born, being attacked in such a way is so awful. Of course these events trickled out to us trying to know what was happening...but slowly at the time. And wow, I never heard from you before your detailed story of what happened there to you. So when you got to this house, you stayed for thirteen days I imagine because you didn’t dare go out.

Hisham: Literally we couldn’t. There were tanks everywhere in the streets.

Mark: What were the Israelis doing? Were they simply demonstrating to the world that they could do whatever they like, even bomb the Church of Christ's birth?

Hisham: Absolutely, and yes, they even killed the man who went up to ring the bell of the church and they killed many people inside the church. Some priests from the church have attested to the gruesome scenes following the assault owing to the lack of anywhere to even to bury the dead.

My point here is to illustrate the way the Nativity Church incident was badly handled. Some people prevailed upon Arafat, who himself was under siege in Ramallah, to delegate the responsibility of negotiating with the Israelis on how to end the siege to some Palestinian figures who were not respected in Palestinian society in Bethlehem. The way the crisis was finally resolved was quite detrimental in that many Palestinians inside the church were forced to be exiled outside of Palestine according to the agreement that what was arrived at.

Also, some Palestinians staying in the Muqata with Arafat had to be taken, with the help of the Americans, to a prison in Jericho. It was in fact a prison supervised by the Americans and administered by the Palestinian Authority. Then these prisoners were later abducted by Israel, one of these being the head of the PFLP.

So, the way that the siege of the Nativity Church was resolved was absolutely awful and the solution was really blamed on Arafat himself. No doubt this too was what the Israelis wanted knowing they were in talks with Bush in Washington to end U.S. protection for Arafat and be able to kill him.

Now I know that although Arafat was the one who delegated the responsibility of the negotiation to some less than respected individuals, he was not on top of things then.

Another crisis was after the destruction and massacre in the refugee camp near Jenin during the Intifada. You may recall that one of the refugee camps was put under siege for so many days and there was a huge massacre that shook the whole world in the Jenin area. After the massacre, Arafat wanted to visit the refugee camp because he was a people oriented leader and was very close to the people. This was just before he was prohibited from going anywhere.

So, he went to Jenin and was about to enter the camp when, at the very last moment, he was told by his advisors that the people in the camp wanted to kill him; and so at the last minute the visit was canceled.

Now, after looking into the matter very carefully, I found that this was not the case after all. What the people in the camp said was that they would absolutely carry Arafat on their shoulders out of love but that they would not allow any of the other cronies who were coming with him, particularly the Governor of Jenin, because he was viewed not only as corrupt but detrimental to Palestinian interests in the Jenin area.

Of course, those advisors around Arafat did not tell him the truth and they twisted the story around so he would cancel the trip. You cannot imagine how much he was blamed for the cancellation. He really looked bad.

These were all attempts at politically assassinating him and these attempts were systematic, they were organized, and they were not arbitrary. They all served to prepare the Palestinians psyche, and world public opinion, for Arafat’s assassination.

Mark: Well they also spread the rumor that he was gay and that he had HIV.

Hisham: That too.

Mark: When you mention massacres, I think we should also mention the horrible Hebron massacre at the tomb of Abraham. I think that was the year before Rabin was assassinated. That also created great tension, animosity, and fear which the Israelis used to manipulate the takeover of Hebron. Then there was an agreement in 1997 that Arafat was coerced into signing with Netanyahu, who actually shook his hand, whereas Sharon never did.

So much was happening that has either been forgotten or never was put in overall perspective! I think you gave the example of what happened in Bethlehem to demonstrate what was happening not only to Arafat's reputation but to his own psyche due to isolation and co-opted advisers. And yes it certainly did kind of prepare the way for his assassination.

Hisham: Absolutely. This was a crisis that shook the entire world! This was the siege of the Nativity Church itself, the very place where Christ was born. And in my view, the crisis was absolutely mishandled.

Mark: Yes, mishandled as you have outlined...but what’s new? The PLO and the PA had been mishandling so much for so long by that time.

Hisham: Just to give you a further flavor of the mishandling of the crisis. At the height of the tension, when some Palestinians were getting killed inside the church and the Church was actually being shelled, a Palestinian negotiator ventured out to talk with the Israelis. This was a man who I knew and had very little respect for and I actually think of him very skeptically, as do almost everyone I know in Bethlehem. As he exited the church, he was being broadcast nationally on Israeli television hugging the Israeli soldiers surrounding the church at the height of the tension. You can imagine the sour feelings that were left among Palestinians when they saw that scene! Here is their negotiator and supposed protector hugging the very people who have been shooting at and killing them!

Mark: So here was Sharon, manipulating himself into power, resurrecting himself from the Lebanon War in 1982 where that commission recommended he never serve in public office , and eventually taking the office of prime minister. Sharon knew exactly what he wanted to do with his power and so he immediately ignited the Intifada, began construction on the wall, assassinated the founder of Hamas, placed Ramallah and Bethlehem under siege, and drove more nails into the coffin of any possible real Two-State Solution.

And then, he focused his attention on his greatest nemesis, Arafat. After years of being held back by such people as Begin, Reagan, and Clinton, Sharon was finally free to end the life of his greatest enemy. So what do you think happened Hisham? It had to have quite the conspiracy and it had to involve more than just the Israelis.

Hisham: Well, no doubt about it. As a matter of fact and in conjunction with the political assassination of Arafat, there were some unnecessary problems being created for Arafat. Criminal, gangster type, activity began erupting in the Gaza Strip that really was meant to distract Arafat’s attention. For example, Ahmed [name], was leading some militia groups in the Gaza Strip and it was believed that he was about to split with Arafat and form his own group, which really distracted Arafat during that crucial period.

Mark: In those years I would be at meetings in Washington and Palestinians would be there and now oftentimes people I didn’t know and when I would ask them who they were, they would proudly say that they worked with [name]. It seemed to me at the that that he was being built up and propped up by the Americans, and of course working with the Israelis, as an alternative to Arafat.

Hisham: Absolutely. There were many skirmishes and problems with [name]; he even had the Muqata assaulted on more than one occasion. So, yes, the assassination of Arafat had to take multiple elements to succeed. The Israelis could do the planning and prepare the way, but some of the execution had to be carried out by Palestinian elements.

Mark: What what do you think happened, in the end, to Arafat?

Hisham: I can say with certainty that he was poisoned and as a matter of fact there was a pre-assassination performance a year earlier that I was witness to.

In 2003, I took a group of my graduate students from Birzeit University to Cairo to meet with the Arab League and various ambassadors. And one evening as we were sitting in the Hotel, the news broke a story that Arafat was ill and was about to die. We quickly got in touch with Ramallah and found out that that there was an unprecedented media gathering outside the Muqata in the belief that Arafat had died or was about to die.

Well, he came out of that alive. That was a kind of test performance to gauge likely public reaction I think. Or maybe they believed that whatever they were injecting into Arafat would lead him to die right there and then. He did not and it took him a whole year of personal struggle with what was a slow mysterious poison. I cannot be certain or sure of just what happened when. But I have every reason to believe that the man was assassinated and I’d like to know why there was no autopsy performed on him.

Mark: Well not only no autopsy, but they very quickly buried him in concrete. I remember those days. Sharon and other public officials were making statements that were being ublicly reported in fact, and echoed by various Jewish groups, that they were going to kill him. I remember a New York Post front page with a picture of Sharon saying that he would kill Arafat. But in order to pull it off, at least the cover up had to be cooperated in by some of the very officials who were still in positions of Palestinian leadership because there wasn’t just the poisoning but the logistics of whisking him off to a private French military hospital, how to pay off Suha, how to prevent an autopsy, how to prevent his doctor of 25 years from going with them. There were quite a few steps that required very close people to Arafat to cooperate.

Hisham: Absolutely. As far as I am concerned this chapter is far from being complete. Yes, indeed, there was a cover up, yes indeed the entire matter was handled questionably to say the least. This was not the way to deal with the leader of a people and, of course, we have not seen any convincing answer from a Palestinian official thus far. When I was involved in the interviews with all the presidential candidates before the 2005 elections, I asked Mahmoud Abbas, point blank, what he planned to do about investigating Arafat’s assassination. And I have yet to hear any convincing answer.

Mark: You know, when the assassination happened, you and I got in touch by phone; communication had become easier and we had the Internet then. I had been publishing Mid-East Realities since 1996 and so we used MiddleEast.org as a vehicle to publish some articles including an interview I did with you on the phone. We were saying right then that the story coming from Paris, that Arafat was dying from unknown causes, was false. The preponderance of the circumstances and evidence even then was overwhelming linking his death to the very people who had been threatening to kill him. We wondered why there was so much cooperation from top Palestinian officials and I’ll name them: It was Abbas himself, it was Nabil Shaath, it was Suha Tawil, his wife...quite some story onto itself!

Hisham: Well, you know, for whatever its worth as a piece of information, Abbas was not on speaking terms with Arafat before Arafat’s illness.

Mark: Wow, I didn’t know that. Not even on speaking terms?

Hisham: No. There was absolutely no communication whatsoever. For Abbas to get to his house he had to be accompanied by a lot of guards and, it was often the case, by Israeli military jeeps.

Mark: For Abbas to get to Arafat’s compound or his own house?

Hisham: To his own house.

Mark: He was so worried that people hated him enough to harm him?

Hisham: Absolutely.

Mark: Well, you know, what’s being suggested here, is that Abbas, himself, wanted to inherit Arafat’s position after so many years. He either knew about or participated in the demise and removal of Arafat and/or participated in the huge cover up so that people would think around the world that the assassination was just a conspiracy theory.

Hisham: Well, for sure, at least in the cover up.

Mark: Okay, well, those were the years when the ‘Quartet’ got started, designed to keep American control of the “peace process” but give it an international veneer; and designed to keep the “peace process” out of UN hands by reducing the UN to simply being member of the quartet. That’s when the “road map” started and when 9/11 happened.

There are so many other people who have written about all of these things; but at least we have to factor all of them in, especially the impact of 9/11 I think.

At the time of 9/11 Sharon was prime minister of Israel and Bush/Cheney were in control in Washington. Then the Afghan War erupts, followed by the Invasion of Iraq, and then Arafat was assassinated and Abbas took over. Then, in 2006, there were parliamentary elections in the still occupied territories and in Hamas won.

Now how were you involved during these critical years, Hisham? You mentioned that you questioned Abbas about Arafat’s assassination. How did that come about? You were very well connected I think in Palestine at the time. And how did you end up being one of three people interviewing all the Presidential candidates on PA TV?

Hisham: You know, during the Intifada, I would publish a weekly column in [name] Newspaper, the leading newspaper in the occupied territories. Every week I would have a different theme about the uprisings and my articles were widely read and well received. They were more analytical than the conventional journalistic articles; this is not to suggest that journalistic articles are not analytical...

Mark: I know what you mean.

Hisham: In late 2004 I was contacted by somebody from Palestine TV who told me that after much deliberation I was chosen to serve as one of the interlocutors of all presidential candidates. Each would be interviewed for an hour and a half. Well, I said that I needed time to think. At that time I was extremely reluctant to be a part of this because I didn’t want to appear part of what was going on and to lend it credibility. I was so upset with the way Arafat’s assassination was handled, by acting like it was normal death. I felt there needed to be investigations, answers, accountability.

Anyway, after consulting some close friends, I decided to participate but I made it very clear that I intended to ask the kind of questions I wanted. They agreed saying that they would only supply me with suggested questions (and I knew they really hoped I would stick to them). But they did allow me the freedom to ask my own. So that was that. I didn’t ask for any money, just the opportunity to ask what I wanted.

Mark: And it was live?

Hisham: No, it wasn’t going to be live but recorded. But it was also agreed that whatever we recorded would be broadcast.

Mark: I’ve been in situations where such agreements were not kept.

Hisham: That’s absolutely true but I think that at that time, knowing that it was impossible to do it any other way, they decided to stick to the terms of broadcasting.

Mark: Okay, so give me a flavor of what happened? Over what period of time, and over how many programs because this was a big thing for you.

Hisham: It was a huge thing. There were observers from all around the world including Jimmy Carter and [word]. So that was done in December 2004 into January 2005. We would record with each candidate for an hour and a half but of course you can imagine how much preparation had to take place before. So when the time came to interview Mahmoud Abbas, there was an interesting anecdote that hasn’t been published before. Just before he entered the room where the recording was done in the Grand Park Hotel in Ramallah, a decoration on the wall fell creating a huge sound like an explosion. You cannot imagine the commotion this caused as everyone in the hotel starting running to see what happened. Had it happened just a couple minutes later when Abbas was in the room, it is very likely that all of us could have been killed by his guards because nobody from his security detachment was allowed in the recording room.

Mark: They would have thought he was being attacked and maybe burst into the room shooting?

Hisham: Yes, maybe, there was so much tension and apprehension and fear at the time. But anyway, as we began the interview with him I asked him about Arafat’s assassination and why he hadn’t done anything about it. The answer he gave was too general; nothing specific whatsoever.

Mark: Did you follow up?

Hisham: I wanted to but wasn't able to then. I wanted to in the weeks and months ahead but after the election I never had an opportunity. That’s what I would really like to do; to follow up with him now.

Mark: Now let me ask you about the timing as I am a little confused. Arafat died in early November 2004 but it sounds like all this was taking place very quickly.

Hisham: Yes, right after, in the last days of December 2004.

Mark: So there were already presidential elections scheduled.

Hisham: Well, according to the bylaws, the head of the legislative council would become president for sixty days until elections were held. And that is exactly what happened. There was actually what seemed a slow transition as if nothing had happened at all.

Mark: So this all happened in a two month period and that is why you said that you were reluctant to be involved in the process.

Hisham: I was called in late December just before the interviews were to start.

Mark: And then the interviews took place in the days before the election. That’s why there were already observers present.

Hisham: Exactly.

Mark: And how many candidates were there?

Hisham: There were seven candidates.

Mark: And you were on the panel that interviewed them all?

Hisham: There were three people – myself, a communications professor from Birzeit University, and a journalist from [name] Newspaper.

Mark: And you interviewed each of them independently?

Hisham: Yes, these interviews were to serve as a substitute for presidential debates because the belief was that it would be hard to conduct a debate with seven different candidates at once although that really would have been my preference. In addition to the seven sessions, we had also an eighth session to interview the people in charge of the election commission.

Mark: And you insisted that you wouldn’t take any money for this?

Hisham: Well, I didn’t ask for any money at all.

Mark: Yes, but I know you’re not a very rich person and you have a big family living in a refugee camp and this was a huge commitment of time and energy. This is purely a guess, but I would imagine that the other interviewers were paid.

Hisham: Well, I definitely asked for transportation to be arranged and whatever expenses were incurred but that wasn’t my objective at the end of the day. But yes, I believe some other people did demand to be paid. At the end of the day we were all paid, really, peanuts but I don’t remember the exact amount. It was really just symbolic; maybe two hundred dollars.

Mark: Did you attend any parties or ceremonies? Or were you simply disgusted and did not want to be involved anymore?

Hisham: I was disgusted but I observed what was happening. I was a very keen observer of what was going on because I really wanted to watch the process unfold.

Mark: And then, of course, the Americans were pushing democracy and Condoleezza Rice was pushing the legislative council election and I think they were probably thinking that they needed a nice cooperative legislative counsel to compliment Abbas. In the end this was about politics and they wanted somebody to sign agreements with the Israelis; something Arafat had refused to do in his last years. But that backfired on them didn’t it?

Hisham: Oh yes it did.

Mark: OK, tell me that story and tell me how you came back to the states.

Hisham: I say we leave this for the next chapter.

Mark: Okay, we'll start here!